A cold winter in Lookingglass 'Ethan Frome' but not much blood running through the snow
THEATER REVIEW: "Ethan Frome" ★★½ Through April 17 at the Lookingglass Theatre in Water Tower Water Works, 821 N. Michigan Ave.; Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes; Tickets: $20-$62 at 312-337-0665 or www.lookingglasstheatre.org
Like the hapless lovers in Emile Zola's throbbing “Therese Raquin,” or the wound-tight cowboys in “Brokeback Mountain,” the forlorn trio at the core of Edith Wharton's “Ethan Frome” live and love in a world much more limiting and far more intense than our own. Wharton's 1911 novel imagined a kind of remote and minuscule New England town — which she revealingly named “Starkfield”— where winter was so snowy, cold and desolate that life itself seemed to be dangling by a thread in a blizzard wind. Since it's currently March in Chicago, you might know the feeling. But you surely have more means of escape.
In that intensely defined and crystallized setting, Wharton places her title character — one of those taciturn New Englanders with great intelligence, deep feelings and the layers of emotional repression that come from never getting out. She first gives him a wife with whom he shares no passion, and then she sticks his wife's impoverished-but-vibrant younger cousin into their stoical domestic milieu. Ethan Frome blooms with passion, his wife, Zena, festers with resentment, and his lover Mattie Silver single-handedly melts Ethan's winter. Yet we know from the start that it will not end well for any of this trio.
This kind of narrative story — geographically tiny and emotionally massive — is a very tough dramatic assignment. And the deeper passions of “Ethan Frome,” mostly prove too much for Laura Eason's new self-directed adaptation, which premiered Saturday night at the Lookingglass Theatre in Chicago and tries to stage these tempestuous events in just 90 minutes. This is an honorable endeavor — and a further reminder that Philip R. Smith, whose work in the title role is rooted and arresting, has become one of Chicago's most powerful actors with greatness ahead. Lisa Tejero (Zena) and Louise Lamson (Mattie) are similarly distinguished Lookingglass actors and bring their formidable skills and nuances to this production, but neither woman feels especially well cast. And although there are some resonant connections here and there, the piece lacks the foreboding, inevitability, sexual tension and, most crucial, the dangerous passion that should drive these careening characters down the steep slope of their lives.
To put it bluntly, you don't feel enough. Because you don't sense that enough is being felt. Or risked.
Part of the problem here, I think, is the physical milieu of the show and its lack of atmosphere. Eason has created a stark, simple landscape — the Frome house, designed by Daniel Ostling, is a fragile silhouette, and a couple of bare-branched trees sway in the storms that buffet this tale. Andrew White, always an honest, dignified presence, takes on Wharton's narrator, who unpacks this story in the novel (all of the other characters necessary to the story are carefully played by Eric Lochtefeld). And although starkness is certainly part of this landscape, the look and feel of the production don't really have a solution for the way the hot, red, barely repressed passion turns all that snow scarlet.
In “Ethan Frome,” feelings quickly blanket this sparse world. You wait in vain for some visual metaphor of the way our passions put meat on the bones of our world, even if the bones sometimes snap in the process.
The production doesn't envelop you in the sensual way that, say, the snowbound John Madden 1993 movie (which starred Liam Neeson and Patricia Arquette) managed to achieve. You don't feel the force of the isolation — and thus the impact of the arrival of Mattie. And I don't think Eason has yet found the right theatrical metaphor for Ethan and Mattie's shocking final ride. They spin. They don't race forward.
The actors, especially Tejero, seem a tad fearful of overplaying the feverish actions of their characters, and thus they tend to arrive at a kind of slightly intensified neutrality as a mode of representing repression. That's just fine some of the time. Maybe even most of the time. But at crucial moments, such as when Ethan first proposes to Zena, you want to see more risks taken — and, well, more of a discernible subtext. It's the same with Smith and Lamson — you lean into them, intrigued but wanting them to show you more oomph at the flashpoints, especially as we approach the rush of their fate.
Eason gets a bit trapped with her narrator — who is a likable presence but must hang in some very personal shadows here, looking a little awkward and, well, in the way. He has a few too many straight-from-the-narrative lines about Ethan Frome — like “he wanted to say …” That doesn't feel necessary, given that actors such as Smith, Tejero and Lamson are perfectly capable of showing us what their characters wanted to say. When the world is full.
Considering the playwrights recent comments regarding how she feels that a playwright who writes a formulatic two-handed sex play gets more respect than one who does a great adaption of classic novel, I suspected that this adaptation would be phoned in.
Posted by: Focking With Novels | March 10, 2011 at 02:04 AM