Philip Barry was a great narrator of the American story during the 1930s and 1940s, investing his characters with a hunger for financial and personal success, a desire to be unconventional and a fear of unorthodox behavior. In his “Holiday,” now being performed at 1st Stage, Barry touched on all those issues, questioning how best to live a full and productive life.
“Holiday,” written in 1928, begins with two young people, Julia Seton (Sophia Bushong) and Johnny Case (John Adams), who have recently met at Lake Placid and fallen in love. Now Johnny is coming to Julia’s home to meet her father. He is astonished to find that Julia’s is a famous, wealthy family.
Johnny is a 30-year-old lawyer in a good firm. He has a bright future ahead of him but doesn’t have connections or riches and is thus not what Julia’s father thinks of as a good match for his daughter. But Julia’s heart is set on the marriage, and she convinces her father, Edward Seton (Paul Douglas Michnewicz), to let them marry.
Edward Seton’s younger daughter, Linda (Allison Leigh Corke), is delighted with the idea of the marriage and insists that she be allowed to give a party in honor of the couple on New Year’s Eve. When her plans for a simple celebration are taken over by her manipulative father, who invites hundreds of people, Linda refuses to attend the party and retires to her old playroom on the top floor of the Seton mansion, accompanied by her friends and her brother, Ned (Ryan Kincaid).
It is there Johnny reveals his common stock is rising quickly, he soon will have a great deal of money and he wants to enjoy his life rather than work. From this point on, it becomes clear “Holiday” is a play dedicated to investigating how to live, whether work is the answer to finding happiness or whether Johnny should live “as a man whose time for a while … is his own.”
Under the direction of Dawn McAndrews, the 1st Stage actors become an effective ensemble. Bushong is credible as the outwardly gracious but secretly demanding Julia, at first very much in love with Johnny but growing increasingly like her father, valuing money above all else. Adams is charming as the boyish, straightforward Case, who believes that people should enjoy life, not spend it amassing riches.
Cheryl Patton Wu’s period costumes are neatly detailed representations of 1928 and 1929: vests and spats for the men, stylish hats and head-wraps for the women. Her dressy flapper costumes capture the shimmer and elegance of wealthy women just before the crash of 1929.
Barry was fascinated by the question of what constitutes happiness and how people choose to achieve it. This 1st Stage “Holiday” nicely reproduces Barry’s dramatic representation of two individuals — Johnny and Linda — who choose to look for that happiness in freedom rather than in safety.
