Michael Wilson shows his directorial gift for guiding strong women characters when he helms John Van Druten's Old Acquaintance at the American Airlines Theatre in June.

“On the surface it's this delightful comedy, almost
a two-headed version of The Women.”

So, if you are talking to modern audiences, how do you set up the premise and make it understandable to them? The morality is so different.

I think one of the ways you do that is you keep it very much in its period. That's one of the things that makes Kit so courageous and bold and independent. Moving it outside of that is treacherous. Even the Bette Davis-Miriam Hopkins film, when they released it in 1943, updated it to wartime. It becomes a very different kind of story when our country's engaged at war and our men are in and out of service, back home and on leave. It changes the focus of the story.

To the extent that anybody knows this title, they probably know it through the movie. How different is the play?

Very. There are some key plot elements and scenes in the film that are lifted from the play. But the movie begins 20 years earlier, and you actually see Kit and Millie grow through 20 years of their friendship. The play is compressed into a six-week time period.

John Van Druten. New Appreciation for Old Acquaintance John Mason Brown, in the Post on Dec. 24, 1940, led a chorus of appreciative reviews for Old Acquaintance. John Van Druten “can remain witty in the statement of sympathy, his observations are often gay, and his characters do not fire them off as if they had Roman candles stuck in their mouths,” Brown wrote. In the Times, Brooks Atkinson praised Van Druten's “enviable grace, humor, and compassion. What he has to say you recognize instinctively as unalloyed truth.” Most critics, though, saved their real hat-tossing for the two leading ladies. Jane Cowl was, if not the First Lady of the American Theatre, perhaps its second or third, after Helen Hayes and Katharine Cornell. “She plays with fullness and richness of emotion and technical virtuosity, reminding you constantly that acting is not only a trade but a fine art,” wrote Atkinson. Her fencing partner, Peggy Wood, later remembered for television (Mama) and movies (The Sound of Music), found in Old Acquaintance a career high-water mark. Atkinson again: “She is giving the best performance of her career, honest, aware, and lucidly projected.” The pair, observed Robert Coleman in the Daily Mirror, “stage a histrionic duel that is a lulu, using every weapon known to the acting heart, with no holds barred. This brilliance should have the whole town talking and keep the Morosco packed for the next several months.” It did, with Old Acquaintance lasting 170 performances, a fine run for the day. It was equally well received in London, with Edith Evans as Kit. Variety had noted Old Acquaintance's “click possibilities” in its Boston tryout, adding that it was a solid “bet for pix.” Warner Brothers paid $75,000 for the rights, seeing it as an obvious vehicle for the queen of the lot, Bette Davis. Davis had previously sparred on screen with Miriam Hopkins in The Old Maid (1939); 1943 audiences delighted in seeing a simmering screen rivalry brought to a new boil, notably in a scene, lifted faithfully from the stage version, in which Ms. Davis' Kit, thoroughly fed up with Ms. Hopkins' Millie, shakes her silly. This, to virtually everyone's thinking, wasn't just acting. Old Acquaintance was last heard from in 1962, touring New Jersey and Long Island, with Arlene Francis. But drawing-room comedies' civilized charms haven't been sampled much since. We'll get to savor them anew when Old Acquaintance begins performances at the American Airlines Theatre in June. – M.M.

Is Kit still living with the guy in the movie?

Well, we should say she's having an affair with him, and he does stay over occasionally. One of the ways that you convey the morality of the period is already embedded in the play itself. Kit wants to set an example for Millie's daughter, Deirdre. She'll only reveal certain aspects of her behavior to Deirdre because she wants to set some kind of moral example. She's created two different standards, one that she's comfortable with for herself and a different bar that she wants to set for, you could almost say, her goddaughter, because Kit's really the surrogate mother of the child.

What do you know about John Van Druten, the author?

He's a really interesting guy. He was one of our more celebrated writers of light romantic comedies at this time. He directed The King and I on Broadway. He had success in Hollywood. When he would have been writing Old Acquaintance, he was also one of the screenwriters for Gone with the Wind. I find a little of the histrionics of Mildred Watson Drake, Harriet Harris' character, in the dramatics of Scarlett O'Hara.

Obviously, he liked independent women.

Van Druten liked women who are quite willing to get fierce and ferocious to go after what they want. Millie especially is a tenacious character. One of the great things about the play, at a time when we often define our lives by our career, our family origins, or our significant-other relationships, this play reminds us how important friendships are—in knowing who we are and sustaining a sense of identity. In fact, this play asks the question of what role friendships play in our lives.

Van Druten, very smartly, has shown us these women at specific turning points in their lives. Kit obviously is past the conventional marrying age, but is now with a man several years her junior who has made a proposal to her. And she is actually considering accepting because there's part of her that feels her life may not be complete unless she is married and has a go at that kind of relationship. On the other hand, Millie is at the point where her daughter is growing up, leaving the nest. She's going to have an empty house. Her husband's been gone for ten years. There probably won't be many men coming a-courting. What is going to define her, other than her role as an author of great commercial success?

Well, it's a lot to play, and a lot to direct.

That's what I love about it. On the surface it's this delightful comedy, almost a two-headed version of The Women. Underneath that, there's a tremendous amount of subtext and psychological depth that make it extremely compelling.

You're known as a specialist in Tennessee Williams, especially at Hartford. Do you see any Williams aspects to the characters or the material?

Yes. Tennessee was great at capturing women in dire and extreme circumstances. Harriet Harris, in fact, when we did the reading, was playing Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie, and we both saw some shared flightiness and shared expectations [between the characters]. A lot of Tennessee's characters cope with the tensions of convention. The conventions are from a past society, a society whose borders are breaking down, yet there are people who are still living out those rules. Certainly that is part of the tension between Millie and her daughter. Millie, like Amanda, wants Deirdre's life to go a certain way. Deirdre has her own ideas and own needs, in response to a world that is shifting and changing rapidly.

It's a three-act play; are there going to be any cuts or revisions?

There are going to be slight revisions here and there. I've been going through the play, and it's not like there's a lot of fat in it. Van Druten was very careful about, foreshadowing events and getting certain details in. He was meticulous. If there's repetition, it's usually for a reason. In every respect, we're approaching this play very much in the style of the Broadway theatre of 1940. We're using the main-drape curtain, the set is going to be very lavish and realistic. I'm not at all interested in trying to make the play seem as if it were written in 2007.

Marc Miller is a copy chief at Business Week and writes frequently about the theatre.

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