Oh
gosh, I sure wanted to like Kate Hamill’s
adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s
novel Little Women more than I did. She has been so on-target with
other adaptations of classic novels…but this one, presented by Primary Stages at the Cherry Lane, though respectable, is a
mild experience.
To
a certain degree, the source material itself is the problem, or at least the
problem Ms. Hamill hasn’t entirely cracked. Alcott’s Civil War era novel of a
family of sisters, father off to war, Mom coping as best she can—and in the
center of it, renegade sister Jo, who doesn’t want the conventional things, but
desires instead to be a writer—is episodic. This is fine in the page of a novel,
because narrative description and internalization interact with the
reader’s imagination to create a cumulative build, even when there’s more
incident than actual story. But dramatization, even with use of theatre’s poetic
devices—such as time compression, open space staging, selective abstraction of
the physical world, locale via suggestion, etc.—works on the imagination
differently…you invite a book into your head;
a play performed invites you into its “head,”
as it were, by soliciting your complicity in its schema. You don’t get to mull
it, it moves in real time, and your sense
of movement requires something propulsive. There’s no
one-size-fits-all formula for what that something must be, but for the likes of Little Women, it needs to be a sense of
story threading through Jo’s recollections, not just continuing portraits of
familial development. That something can even be the illusion
of story, away of reframing the content within a context that makes the audience
hunger for what happens next; that kind of reframing takes a good deal of deconstructive
analysis, because you have to build it in organically while not violating the
things most important to you in the source material…but it can be done, and it
provides a motor.
Ms.
Hamill’s Little Women is pleasant
enough, but absent that motor, it often seems too leisurely, though director Sarna Lapine and a
very nice cast maintain what I assume is the script’s sense of technical and
scene-to-scene fluidity, which is no minor infusion within the writing and no minor accomplishment to realize onstage.
Plus there’s a factor of this production to which my own reaction
surprised me. The entire ensemble is Caucasian, at least of appearance, except for the actress playing Jo, who
is black (Kristolyn Lloyd). And I say this as a fellow who
has passionately debated in favor of diversity casting, even in cases where it
requires the viewer to make a poetic adjustment and set aside literal
representation. I don’t find it
“confusing” (one of the favorite words from the opposite camp) when, for
example, a black actor plays Jean Valjean in Les Misérables, nor
when a black actress plays the matriarch in August:
Osage County, because I’m happy to make that mental pact with a production.
There are times when a script dictates otherwise—Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band can and must only
have one black actor or large
passages of it stop making sense, just as Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun can and must have
only one white actor—but if the script
is not dealing with ethnicity as a literally acknowledged issue, I think almost anything goes.
But
absent any other conspicuous persons of color in the cast of Little Women, Ms. Lloyd, who turns in a
very engaging performance, became conspicuous to me as a metaphorical symbol…of
difference, of unconventionality, of rebelliousness, of the fight to break free
of restraints (and tacitly of the novel's background Civil War issue of slavery, which is
never specifically mentioned). The choice to throw her into such stark relief
makes the actress not merely the messenger of the theme, but the message
itself. And that made the point too boldly underlined for verisimilitude to gain much of a foothold.
The
flip side of this argument is that Ms. Hamill, Ms. Lapine
& Co. are being forthrightly bold at a time when such boldness adds to the
case for America’s return to humanism, despite a draconian White House and
Senate. And that while you and I get the message without help, there are others
who may come to see the show, in this or perhaps future productions, to whom it
will be a revelation. Where children are concerned, maybe even an inspiration. I can’t discount that
potential.
But let's put casting scheme
aside. The subject of children brings us back to the play in general:
Having worked as a musical
dramatist in the arena of young audience theatre, I would be very
interested to see this production performed
for children. Based on the very specific principles that involve getting
them engaged and holding their attention—TheatreWorks/USA
(for
whom I wrote) has them codified, and you can experiment with bending
them,
and sometimes that’s possible, but they tend never to break—I rather
think Ms.
Hamill’s play needs to solve the structural issues posed above before it
can truly have a lasting family theatre life; but I wouldn’t mind
at all being proved wrong…
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