Mister Roberts
Watertown’s New Repertory Theatre opens its new season with Mister Roberts, a well-produced and well-acted show that runs through October 3 at the Charles Mosesian Theater at the Arsenal Center for the Arts, located at 321 Arsenal Street in Watertown.
Based on the 1946 novel by Tomas Heggen, and adapted for the stage in 1948 by Heggen and Joshua Logan (well before the premiere of the 1955 film and the subsequent short-lived 1965 TV series), the play retains a salty sensibility along with its seaworthy plot. Mister Roberts (Thomas Piper) is the cargo officer on a supply ship in the South Pacific. As World War II draws to a close, Roberts begins to worry that he’s missing something: he’d rather be on a destroyer or some other ship dispatched to the front line in the naval battles against Japan.
But the ship’s captain (Paul D. Farwell) won’t allow Roberts to transfer. The captain won’t allow a lot of things: a martinet who enjoys his power a little too much, the captain punishes the crew for minor infractions and refuses to allow them liberty--unless, that is, Roberts will make a deal to stop petitioning for transfer, and start treating the man like an overlord instead of shielding them from the captain’s abuses.
It’s a steep price, but for the sake of his 167 crewmates, Roberts agrees to the captain’s terms--only to regret it later on.
The form of the play may be dramatic, but you’d scarcely know it from the plethora of comic scenes that the acting company absolutely ace. The crew in all its workingman gusto is represented by a small cadre of characters who oogle nurses through field glasses and argue amongst themselves with a farcical Three Stooges energy, only to band together in the face of the enemy, be it the Japanese fleet (which they never see) or the captain himself.
The officers, meantime, are a comic band of their own: Roberts rooms with womanizing slacker Ensign Pulver (Jonathan Popp) and hangs out with the ship’s doctor (Owen Doyle); their shop talk is as laced with sexual innuendo as anything heard belowdecks, but when the three of them jerry-rig a bottle of scotch out of grain alcohol and hair tonic, there’s no question but that they are officer material.
The actors and the production alike boast a high level of polish. The set by Patrick Lynch is a simple catwalk rigged up to portray the ship’s multiple decks, but it carries the illusion quite well; the sound design is period-specific, from the 1940s ditties to the sounds of seagulls and ship’s engines; Karen Perlow’s lighting has a sultry South Pacific crispness about it, fading to melancholy sunset hues at a dramatic moment.
But even more crucial here is the costuming, and costume designer Molly Trainer pulls it off. We’re looking at the real deal here: Navy-issue whites, blues, and khakis, in period cuts. The production is spare where spare will do, but doesn’t come over as cheap, thanks to the attention New Rep has paid to such details.
In fact, the play feels bigger than you might expect from a midsize company: these guys are good. All together, it’s the full package: never dull, stuffed with charm, graced with good acting and Kate Warner’s fine direction, rollicking with wit. "Mister Roberts" is what they call a timeless classic, in that sixty-one years later the play still has a contemporary feel about it.
"Mister Roberts" plays through Oct. 3 at the Charles Mosesian Theatre, Arsenal Center for the Arts, 321 Arsenal Street, Watertown, MA.
Tickets cost $35-$54; seniors get $7 off regular price. Student rush tickets are $13.
Performance schedule: Friday and Saturday evenings at 8:00 p.m. (with Saturday matinees on Sept. 26 and Oct. 3); Sundays at 2:00 p.m. (with an additional 7:30 p.m. performance on Sept. 27); Thursday evenings at 7:30 p.m.; and one Wednesday evening performance on Sept. 30, at 7:30 p.m.
