The expression “behind closed doors” is a favorite of mine. There’s the weight of it, the dense and dark tone of its implication mixed with the fluff and nothingness of the actual phrase, like a mother telling a child “Because I said so, that’s why.” There’s the gameshow temptation, the “Deal or No Deal” thrill of a hidden reward or punishment. Most of all, I like the ambiguity of location: “Behind closed doors” is the setting, sure, but the phrase could just as soon apply to a person struggling to get out as get in.
The entirety of Harley Granville-Barker’s The Voysey Inheritance takes place in the Voysey family library, more a place for social business than silent work, equally lined with books and stocked with booze. It is in the same library, a high-walled space wedged between two doorways, where Alice Maitland (the quietly manipulative Kathryn Connors) corners her lover, Edward Voysey (Sam Rabinovitz), rifling through the financial records of his classically scheming business partner, also his father. A moment later, Edward’s mother enters the library in the midst of the pair’s conversation, overhears a bit of conversation and exclaims, “We have lost interest? What is she saying, Edward?”
The plot of The Voysey Inheritance unravels from this single interruption like a mangled ball of yarn. Each of the eight Voysey family members enters through the pairs of library doors, one or two at a time, and takes up a strand of the conversation to bat it around, alternately making it tense and then unspool a bit more, pressing it towards its end. It’s a scene repeated during each of the four acts of the play, a series of manic peaks amidst a froth of jabbering family members and thumb-twiddling investors.
It’s also the real meat of the production and director Robert Chapel’s greatest success. Each minor explosion drags more of the Voysey clan into the moral and fiscal mix, from the romantic slacker-artist Hugh Voysey (played by the must-see Nate Wheldon, recently in Twelfth Night) to chief investor George Booth (J. Hernandez, riveting as an increasingly dissatisfied friend of the family). Sure, the audience knows that a ball of yarn is really one long piece, that a closed room is simply a closed room. The pace of Chapel’s production of Voysey simply makes the door an inevitable temptation, the string a fuse that must be lit.
