Review: MRS. MANNERLY is a Sweetly Comic Story of Youth

MRS. MANNERLY, a memory play by Jeffrey Hatcher, takes inspiration from the playwright's memories of a childhood etiquette class that he took at the tender young age of ten. Walking with an etiquette book balanced on your head, learning complex table settings with a confounding array of flatware and stemware, and dropping a quarter in a jar each time you interrupt...those were the ways of Mrs. Mannerly's classes in 1967. Mrs. Mannerly (Jennifer Underwood) has high standards; so high, in fact, that not one student in her thirty-six years of teaching proper deportment has ever achieved perfection. Young Jeffrey (Suzanne Balling) wants to be the first and he has a trick up his sleeve that he thinks makes him a shoe-in to achieve that sought after goal... he has discovered Mrs. Mannerly has a secret past.