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Lunt and Fontanne acting team is played by Byron Jennings and Carolyn McCormick

BY MICHAEL SOMMERS

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

OFF BROADWAY REVIEW

Ten Chimneys is the name of the country place in Wisconsin where the legendary acting team of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne usually spent their summers.

“Ten Chimneys” is the appropriate title for a new comedy about the colorful domestic lives of the Lunts – as they were known to their adoring public for half a century – that opened on Monday at the Theatre at Saint Clement’s in a capable production by the Peccadillo Theater Company.

A mildly diverting two-act play by Jeffrey Hatcher, “Ten Chimneys” unfolds over several days during the summer of 1937, when the Lunts are readying themselves to appear in a Broadway revival of “The Seagull.”

In addition to Alfred (Byron Jennings) and Lynn (Carolyn McCormick), other people in the play include the actor’s doting mama Hattie (Lucy Martin) – who obviously is not fond of Lynn and vice-versa -- his shiftless half-brother Carl (John Wernke) and his overburdened half-sister Louise (Charlotte Booker). Arriving for preliminary rehearsals is the portly character actor Sydney Greenstreet (Michael McCarty) and a very young Uta Hagen (Julia Bray), who has been hired to play Nina in the revival.

The story that follows sees Lynn turning jealous over the attention that Alfred gives to Uta, which is meant to echo somewhat the Arkadina-Trigorin-Nina dynamic of the Chekhov play. The constant friction between Hattie and Lynn, broad hints regarding a possibly homosexual side of Alfred’s nature and a tragedy that haunts Greenstreet’s life are other shadings that the playwright paints into his double portrait of a couple who apparently could never stop acting.

“Whenever we talk about the theater, we’re talking about love,” says Lynn at one point and it is obvious that the all-abiding love the Lunts shared for the theater sustained their own enduring relationship. “Ten Chimneys” is a thin, pasteboard affair festooned with occasionally arch comic dialogue, but Hatcher’s affection for the couple is unmistakable and the show is pleasantly performed.