WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., Aug. 4 — A sharp tongue does not preclude a good heart. Sterling proof of this truth is personified by Miss Moffat, the schoolmistress played with appealing zest by Kate Burton in the Williamstown Theater Festival’s spirited revival of Emlyn Williams’s 1938 comedy, “The Corn Is Green.”
Trying to recruit an ally for her plan to open a school in an impoverished Welsh village, Miss Moffat quizzes another unmarried woman about her hopes for the future. “When the right gentleman appears ...,” the proper Miss Ronberry begins. But she doesn’t get any further.
“If you’re a spinster well on in her 30s, he’s lost his way and isn’t coming,” Miss Moffat tartly interrupts. “Why don’t you face the fact and enjoy yourself, same as I do?”
Forget “He’s just not that into you” — he simply doesn’t exist, my dear. Harsh! But as delivered with a sympathetic smile by Ms. Burton’s gently redoubtable Miss Moffat, the painful diagnosis feels like the beginning of a cure.
Tales of inspiring schoolteachers are a reliable staple of theater, movies and television, but few have displayed the durability of this comedy about a do-gooder British spinster who discovers a budding poet under the soot-covered mug of a young Welsh coal miner.
Audiences today may know the material from the movie with Bette Davis, or the later television version with Katharine Hepburn. The first Broadway production was a long-running hit that provided Ethel Barrymore with one of her best roles. In three tightly structured acts that blend light sentiment with comedy that is still surprisingly pungent, the play hardly cries out for a probing reappraisal, but it makes for a likable diversion on a summer night.
The Williamstown production, directed with a robust sense of period and place by Nicholas Martin, is something of a family affair, which seems wholly apt for this semiautobiographical play, in which the author himself originally starred as the young miner-turned-scholar Morgan Evans.
Ms. Burton’s son, Morgan Ritchie, plays that role here. (His father is Michael Ritchie, former producer of the Williamstown festival, now heading the Center Theater Group in Los Angeles.) In addition, the married actors Dylan Baker and Becky Ann Baker play a pair of colorful supporting roles. And let’s not forget that Ms. Burton is the daughter of the great Welsh actor Richard Burton, making the whole a sort of implicit tribute to the family roots.
Nobody, I should quickly add, appears to have been hired for sentimental reasons. Ms. Burton is in excellent form, radiating intelligent good sense and keeping saintliness firmly at bay. For all her noble intentions, Miss Moffat is an intriguingly prickly character, and Ms. Burton allows her prickles to retain all their potential to sting. The hints that Miss Moffat may be driving her young charge partly to feed her own ego undercuts the purity of her devotion to his schooling, and Ms. Burton draws a keen focus on her few uneasy flickers of self-doubt.
Mr. Ritchie imbues the budding literary genius with a brooding, wary intelligence that flares up into rebellion when Morgan feels himself being turned into an alien creature in his hometown. Morgan’s sense of displacement is movingly conveyed, as is the emotionally transforming discovery that his home is truly the great world outside Wales, with Oxford the first stop on his journey to an unexpected destiny.
As Miss Moffat’s loyal cook and housekeeper, Mrs. Watty, a reformed thief turned enthusiastic Bible-thumper, Ms. Baker gives a rich pudding of a performance, with a Cockney accent precisely on the mark. Mr. Baker is just as fine as the spectacularly obtuse local squire Miss Moffat deftly manipulates into supporting her ambitions for Morgan. His smugly self-regarding upper-crust Englishman is as perfectly turned a piece of caricature as I’ve come across.
In the role of Mrs. Watty’s mischievous daughter, Bessie, Ginnifer Goodwin is not perhaps as idiomatically natural as the others, but the sly glint in her eye and her seductive strut are plausible enticements, drawing young Morgan away from his books, with dangerous results.
Disaster is averted, thank goodness. “The Corn Is Green” is, after all, a comedy. But it endures because, like all good comedy, it never loses sight of the mixed matter that is human nature. Ms. Burton and Mr. Ritchie play the final scene between the teacher and her protégé with a smart sense of the complexities in their relationship, their shared complicity in both his triumph and potential downfall.
Young Morgan may at last be set forth on the path to glory, but for all Miss Moffat’s determined pedagogy and unspoken love, his escape from the coal mines has been narrow.
THE CORN IS GREEN
By Emlyn Williams; directed by Nicholas Martin; sets by James Noone; costumes by Jeff Mahshie; lighting by Frances Aronson; sound by Drew Levy; production stage manager, Stephen M. Kaus; production manager, Michael Wade; general manager, William Darger. Presented by the Williamstown Theater Festival, artistic director, Roger Rees. In Williamstown, Mass.; (413) 597-3400. Through Sunday. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes.
WITH: Becky Ann Baker (Mrs. Watty), Dylan Baker (the Squire), Tom Bloom (Old Tom), Kate Burton (Miss Moffat), Amanda Leigh Cobb (Sarah Pugh), Barnett Cohen (Glyn Thomas), Jordan Dean (Will Hughes), Ginnifer Goodwin (Bessie Watty), Greg Hildreth (Robbart Robbatch), Patrick James Lynch (a Groom), Kathy McCafferty (Miss Ronberry), Rod McLachlan (John Goronwy Jones), Morgan Ritchie (Morgan Evans) and Joe Tippett (John Owen).
