Sexual tension sizzles at Society Hill's Physick House

STARTING TUESDAY, Society Hill's elegant 18th-century Physick House hosts the shocking 1926 melodrama that got its original Broadway cast, including the suave Basil "Sherlock Holmes" Rathbone, arrested and thrown into jail by New York City cops.

Rathbone said that the forced closing of "The Captive," a very old-school tragedy of same-sex marriage, was a "hideous betrayal" and a "cold-blooded unscrupulous sabotage."

Dan Hodge, the warm-blooded, scrupulous co-founder of the Philadelphia Artists' Collective, laughingly admitted that "when I first heard 'The Captive' had the reputation of being a dirty play, I ran right out and bought a copy."

Hodge, a South Philadelphian by way of West Texas, decided to direct the sexually tense drama for the 2015 Philadelphia Fringe Festival because "it grapples with gender politics and its characters are deeply flawed," he said.

"It's the domestic tragedy of a marriage," Hodge said. "The way these people try to speak to each other and ultimately can't, I think a lot of married people will find familiar."

Audiences at the Physick House, on 4th Street near Cypress, will also find familiar the core sexual controversy that amazingly, nearly 90 years after the play first created a furor, is still a political and religious hot potato today.

The searing drama will unfold amid the cool (there's air-conditioning!) French-flavored furnishings in the Society Hill gem, built in 1786 and named after Dr. Philip Syng Physick, "Father of American Surgery," famous for being one of the few doctors who stayed in Philly, caring for the sick during the yellow fever epidemic of 1793.

The play's fevers are more psychological than physical.

Hodge said "The Captive" fulfills the mission of the award-winning Philadelphia Artists' Collective - an all-star team from the city's leading theater companies - to bring unsung, classical plays from "between antiquity and the early 1930s" to life.

"People think that the only person who wrote before Chekhov was Shakespeare - and that Shakespeare only wrote six plays," Hodge said dryly.

Neither Chekhov nor Shakespeare wrote "The Captive" - French playwright Edouard Bourdet did - and a nightly audience of 35 will see it in two drawing rooms where, Hodge promised, "people will be closer to the drama than they've ever been."

He said he likes presenting plays at the Fringe Festival because it is "where we choose things that are more incendiary and where we take risks because Fringe audiences are more willing to take a chance."

"The Captive" runs through Sept. 20. All tickets are $25 at 215-413-1318 and online at www.fringearts.com.