The Fatal Weakness at Mint Theater Company

Terry Teachout, reviewing in The Wall Street Journal said "the Mint Theater, which has a near-perfect track record of exhuming forgotten plays of the previous century that deserve a happier fate, has gone back to the well with George Kelly, the once-famous author of The Show-Off, whose Philip Goes Forth the Mint produced to brilliant effect last season. This time around it is The Fatal Weakness, an identically impressive play by Mr. Kelly that opened on Broadway in 1946, ran for three months and thereafter went unseen until now. No doubt the ambiguity of The Fatal Weakness explains its initial lack of success. It's a smart, polished not-quite-comedy about the high price of adultery whose upper-crust characters are unlikable and whose moral-if you care to call it that-is uncomfortable. As usual at the Mint, the acting and staging are smoothly impeccable (with Cynthia Darlow making the biggest splash as a relentlessly gossipy busybody), and Vicki R. Davis's sitting-room set looks like the kind of thing you'd see on Broadway if Broadway still did plays like this." "Here in 2014, the Mint Theater Company is making this George Kelly work an amusing, affecting reminder that the institution of marriage has been under siege for much longer than we tend to think. Another fine revisiting by the Mint Theater Company. The play starts out as a comedy but ends as a rather poignant melodrama, and it shows us that the epidemic of divorce and the questioning of marriage as an institution are not the recent phenomena that we might have thought," said Neil Genzlinger in The New York Times.

Authors

• George Kelly