Hartford Stage Takes to the Eyre

Review of Jane Eyre, Hartford Stage

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre has the distinction of being one of the first great first-person narratives in British fiction and probably the earliest great first-person narrative by a female author. Most other early examples of a woman narrating her own story—Moll Flanders comes to mind—were written by a man in character as a woman. Brontë’s Jane tells her own story and addresses her “dear Reader” directly. The intimacy is key to the story. It’s a confession, of sorts, but a confession in which the point is how one becomes who one is. Jane, come from obscurity with only harmful relatives (she believes), makes her way in the world with gumption, an enduring sense of her own dignity, a passionate sense of right and wrong, a perhaps revolutionary sense of woman’s due, and an admirable way with a story.

John Reed (Grayson DeJesus), Child Jane (Meghan Pratt) in Elizabeth Williamson’s adaptation of Jane Eyre at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Adapted the novel has been before, often. Many film versions—I’ve seen at least three—and no doubt stagings. At Hartford Stage, Associate Artistic Director Elizabeth Williamson directs her own adaptation and, in this era when Kate Hamill has engendered a cottage industry of comic adaptations of the kind of British—and even American—classics formerly the stuff of Masterpiece Theater (her Pride and Prejudice has been produced twice this theater season in Connecticut), it’s important to say what Jane Eyre isn’t. It’s not a light-hearted rewrite in the arch tones of contemporary feminism. It’s very faithful to our beloved Jane—and it wisely leaves out the years at the grim Lowood school, a sequence which, though based on real experience, might seem too Dickensian.

And, despite its lack of big whizbang effects (for that famed fire at Thornfield or for moody moors and encounters with a rearing horse), this Jane Eyre works. And that’s because Helen Sadler, as Jane, and Chandler Williams, as Mr. Rochester, are doing very fine work. Certainly, it’s the best romantic pairing of the season.

Mr. Rochester (Chandler Williams), Jane Eyre (Helen Sadler) in Elizabeth Williamson’s adaptation of Jane Eyre at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Rochester, for starters, is a figure so familiar in his gnomic oddity as to be easily lampooned or sent-up. All the trappings of the Gothic—the peremptory Master of a mansion who has a mysterious past, the hapless but helpful governess who arrives and must somehow set things right, the knowing but not-forthcoming servants, the forbidding clime—are here, and Williamson manages to keep them in play without making them clichés. And that’s because Jane, in her forthright effort to show things as she lived them, isn’t the kind to overdramatize or satirize. Getting her tone is essential, and Williamson’s script does.

Jane (Helen Sadler), Mr. Rochester (Chandler Williams) in Elizabeth Williamson’s adaptation of Jane Eyre at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Jane is right in what she thinks and says, and Sadler looks and sounds right as Jane. When she misreads something, we see her error and can watch her come to terms. Her outbursts carry a force that never gets teary or—that great Victorian affliction—overwrought. Her interactions are never too good to be true because Jane’s sense of others is apt to be realistic, for our benefit. She is cautious but not captious. And she’s stirred by her belief that Rochester might actually be her match.

And Williamson’s grasp of Brontë’s tone means that Chandler gets to render an enduring Rochester, a figure who feels like what a female author enamored of Byron and Shakespeare would fashion. He’s mercurial in temper, given to having his way, and, of course, wonderingly struck by a kind of woman he hasn’t encountered before. Chandler lets his body language and an entertaining array of vocal mannerisms create a Rochester as fascinating as Jane feels him to be.

Jane (Helen Sadler), Mrs. Fairfax (Felicity Jones Latta) in Elizabeth Williamson’s adaptation of Jane Eyre at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

All the other characters are ancillary but that doesn’t mean there isn’t still real pleasure, as always, in seeing two veterans of various Connecticut stages—Felicity Jones Latta and Steve Routman—play a variety of roles. Latta is all the elder women in Jane’s life, which makes for an interesting alignment of Mrs. Fairfax, the helpful housekeeper who hired Jane; Aunt Reed, the vindictive relation who dismissed her and who on her deathbed still rejects her; Lady Ingram, the snooty mother of a belle out to snare Rochester; and Bertha, the madwoman in the attic. Routman gets to move through the distinct ranks of British society, the peasant, the military man, the aristocrat, and the cleric. Grayson DeJesus enacts two important potentially spoiler roles, quite different in effect, as Mason, the man who knows of Rochester’s past, and as St. John Rivers, the man who may have a future for Jane. Marie-France Arcilla plays Jane’s rival, her kindly nursemaid when a girl, and a servant with a secret Jane needs to know. Megan Gwyn is primarily Jane’s honorary sister in a family who helps her, and Meghan Pratt is both the child Jane, mistreated and outspoken, and little Adèle, Jane’s French-speaking charge at Thornfield Hall.

The cast of Jane Eyre in Elizabeth Williamson’s adaptation of Jane Eyre at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

The Hall itself is suggested, in Nick Vaughn’s set, by a handsome array of sliding partitions that can open at times to suggest a house beyond, but that can also withdraw to present a stand of trees. There are some nicely done effects with silhouettes and with a turning stage that allows Jane’s narrative to move people on and off as needed. As with Hartford Stage’s popular adaptation of A Christmas Carol, scenery is kept to a minimum and the story moves through an amorphous space that leaves much to our imaginations.

Old-fashioned? Certainly. Jane Eyre is a classic revisited for the satisfactions this intricate and involving story can still deliver and, in Elizabeth Williamson’s succinct and affecting adaptation at Hartford Stage, deliver them it does.

Jane Eyre (Helen Sadler) in Elizabeth Williamson’s adaptation of Jane Eyre at Hartford Stage (photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Jane Eyre
Adapted from Charlotte Brontë’s novel and directed by Elizabeth Williamson

Scenic Design: Nick Vaughn; Costume Design: Ilona Somogyi; Lighting Design: Isabella Byrd; Sound Design: Matt Hubbs; Original Music: Christian Frederickson; Wig & Hair Design: Jason Allen; Dialect Coach: Claudia Hill-Sparks; Fight Choreographer: Greg Webster; Dramaturg: Fiona Kyle; Production Stage Manager: Hannah Woodward; Assistant Stage Manager: Kelly Hardy; Production Manager: Bryan T. Holcombe

Cast: Marie-France Arcilla, Grayson DeJesus, Megan Gwyn, Felicity Jones Latta, Meghan Pratt, Steve Routman, Helen Sadler, Chandler Williams

Hartford Stage
February 13-March 14, 2020

But Little Touch of Harry

Review of Henry V, Hartford Stage

A production in the round is unusual in current Connecticut theaters, and it’s unusual to see a Shakespeare production as stripped-down and bare bones as the version of Henry V now playing at Hartford Stage, directed by Associate Artistic Director Elizabeth Williamson. The choices make for an almost behind-the-scenes feel to this varied play.

Henry (Stephen Louis Grush), foreground, and the cast of Henry V at Hartford Stage (photos by T. Charles Erickson)

This is the third production Williamson has directed at the theater—following Caryl Churchill’s satiric Cloud 9 and an explosive Seder by Sarah Gancher—and she tends to go for edgy. Here, as with the Churchill play, the text requires many different tonalities to succeed fully. The cast—many playing multiple roles—delivers only some of them. The main tone is a very American address to a very British play, leaving the viewer in some doubt as to what and why.

Shakespeare’s play chronicles the effort of the newly crowned Henry V, formerly the dissolute rowdy Prince Hal, to wage war on France, driven by advisors who insist he has a claim to the French crown. Here, as Archbishop of Canterbury, Felicity Jones Latta plays up the comedy of the torturous detail by which the claim is justified without necessarily convincing anyone but Henry that there is a claim. He trusts it and so, at the start, we see a king driven by a prideful decision to prove himself, particularly when the scornful Dauphin of France (Anthony Michael Lopez) sends Henry a bunch of tennis balls as a message. Henry, in France’s view, is a total lightweight, and, while we might recall recent events in which two over-wielding political leaders exchanged taunts while the fate of the world hung in the balance, the exchange doesn’t land as definitive for the action to come. Are we to see Henry as a true king in the making (the general version of the character), or misguided, spoiled, or worse?

The Archbishop of Canterbury (Felicity Jones Latta), foreground, with King Henry (Stephen Louis Grush)

The problem lies mostly with Stephen Louis Grush’s interpretation of Henry. With his shaven head and forceful frame, we easily see him as a man of action. He speaks fast and with a diction better-suited to direct speech than iambic pentameter. His main vocal shift is irascible explosion, otherwise he rarely makes clear the emotions that guide Henry. He’s best when professing himself a soldier unable to woo properly, but that comes late. It may be that Williamson has chosen to downplay the big sentiments that are generally associated with the play, such as the rhetorical fire of the St. Crispin’s Day speech, and that choice makes Henry blend into the ensemble work on view here. The play tends to be more interesting when its titular character isn’t around.

Duke of Gloucester (Reid Williams), Henry V (Stephen Louis Grush)

The staging is empty of most scenic devices, except an occasional table and chair, and wide open, with many points of entry and exit. The floor of the playing space is a map showing the British Isles in relation to mainland Europe. The costuming is a mix of fatigues and fancier uniforms that recall various armies, from the Great War onward. Suffice to say, it’s an eclectic look that does little to recall British history specifically, and the same is true of accents. One character—the truculent Pistol—is played by Miles Anderson with a British accent. As Captain Fluellen of Wales, Baron Vaughn speaks more sing-songy than do the others, which I suppose distinguishes him. A French prisoner, Monsieur Le Fer (Nafeesa Monroe) speaks English as a comic French-person would, and Katherine, the princess of France (Eveyln Spahr) speaks in French and broken English with her French-speaking maid Alice (Felicity Jones Latta). The scene between Alice and Katherine, like the wooing between Henry and Katherine, comes off well, made engaging by Spahr’s skill in romantic comedy.

Henry (Stephen Louis Grush), Katherine of France (Evelyn Spahr), Alice (Felicity Jones Latta)

At the heart of the play here, it seems, are the efforts to loot while at war on the part of Sir John Falstaff’s former companions, Nym (Felicity Jones Latta), Pistol (Miles Anderson), and Bardolph (Liam Craig). The description of Falstaff’s death, by Mistress Quickly (Baron Vaughn), is played for laughs with but scant pathos, and the scene in which Henry agrees to the death by hanging of one of his former cronies brings forward little of the shared past. Here, it’s easy to overlook why these three ne’er-do-wells are even part of the play, as their role in shadowing Henry’s grandiosity is rarely if ever made pointed. They are comic relief, of a sort, though Anderson’s Pistol emerges as the most dynamic character in the play. Bardolph, shorn of his oft-remarked inflamed nose and pustular visage, is good-looking enough to be mistaken for Captain Gower of England (whom Craig also plays). In a key scene Pistol argues for saving the absent Bardolph while Gower looks on. Keep your playbill handy or you may suspect that Gower is Bardolph in a different garment.

Pistol (Miles Anderson), Bardolph (Liam Craig), Nym (Felicity Jones Latta)

In the midst of the lackluster readings of several of the 34 characters enacted by 15 actors in this busy production is the welcome presence of Peter Francis James as the Chorus. Florid, commanding, with a sure sense of the sound and cadence—to say nothing of the vowels and consonants—of Shakespearean rhetoric, James delivers his too few speeches quite effectively. At certain points, I found myself wishing he would simply narrate the story, which would help us to follow the who’s who and what’s what of this complex and not so well-known Shakespearean plot.

Chorus (Peter Francis James)

Disappointing and quizzical, Hartford Stage’s Henry V succeeds at times, but its energy, like that of its hero, too often seems misdirected.

Henry V
By William Shakespeare
Directed by Elizabeth Williamson

Scenic Design: Nick Vaughan; Costume Design: Beth Goldenberg; Lighting Design: Stephen Strawbridge; Sound Design: Matt Hubbs; Original Music: Christian Frederickson; Fight Choreographer: Greg Webster; Dramaturg: Yan Chen; Production Stage Manager: Robyn M. Zalewski

Cast: Karen Aldridge, Miles Anderson, Liam Craig, Kate Forbes, Stephen Louis Grush, Peter Francis James, Felicity Jones Latta, Mark Lawrence, Anthony Michael Lopez, Nafeesa Monroe, Jamie Rezanour, Evelyn Spahr, Haley Tyson, Baron Vaughn, Reid Williams

Hartford Stage
October 11-November 11, 2018

Grace and Rude Will

Review of Romeo and Juliet, Westport Country Playhouse

So often are the plays of Shakespeare given contemporary trappings or the style of a specific period, it seems an innovation to maintain an Elizabethan manner of presentation. This Mark Lamos aspires to—more or less—in the current Westport Country Playhouse production of Romeo and Juliet. Seeing the play given more stately cadences than is often the case helps us see the play anew. In my view, Shakespeare’s best-known play more than ever unfolds as a test of wills, and the tragedy comes from a younger generation sacrificed to enmity through a failed subterfuge.

Romeo (James Cusati-Moyer), Juliet (Nicole Rodenburg); photo credits: Carol Rosegg

The stage, with a wonderful tapestry-like backdrop, is bare as can be imagined. The space, whether a home or a street or the friar’s cell, accommodates few furnishings or props. Such openness makes us see the characters as speech and movement, and the Westport production has much to feast the eye on, with Fabian Fidel Aguilar’s sumptuous costumes, the dramatic arrangements of bodies, and Lamos’ eye for tableau.

There’s a courtliness to the whole that does away with the naturalism that most productions use as a default mode. And that means the language of Shakespeare is allowed to be arcane when it must be and full of the surprise of utterance that is key to how his characters interact. We may feel that we are hearing some of these speeches for the first time. Certainly each character speaks as though compelled to give voice to strong feelings.

And yet it is not the protestations of love by Romeo (James Cusati-Moyer) and Juliet (Nicole Rodenburg) that remains most fully in the ear. The adults in the play almost swamp the young lovers with their advice and exhortations and ultimatums. Which is as it should be as the lovers here seem to be closer to their intended ages than is often the case. Cusati-Moyer, in particular, plays immature well. Though neither actor is teen-aged, they come across as impetuous and, more importantly, as governed by what pleases them. And what would please each most is being in love.

Romeo (James Cusati-Moyer), Juliet (Nicole Rodenburg)

For Romeo that wish is a generalized hunger; we first meet him pining for Rosalind who is indifferent, only to come across Juliet who immediately feels as he does. And for Juliet, passionate attachment must be swift and sure as her father Capulet is only too eager to marry her off to any likely suitor. Lamos’ pacing of the pair’s tragic love lets us see how sudden it is for them, how undetected by all but their trusted confidantes—more on those in a moment—and how it lives for them the way any new sensation does for the young: as something that has never been known before, ever. What’s striking is that we seem to overhear these lovers rather than watch them play out a passion for our benefit.

As Capulet, Triney Sandoval displays the moods of patriarchy to telling effect. He shrugs off Romeo’s presence at the Capulet party, if only to browbeat his nephew, Tybalt (Dave Register). Then is even more eager to browbeat his daughter, married unbeknownst to him, when she’s not eager to wed Countee Paris (Cole Francum). Capulet is a bully, plainly, and the play is, among other things, a way to give him a comeuppance, much as it does his wife, played without irony by Alison Cimmet: her fault is to depend too much upon Juliet’s nurse.

Capulet's Wife (Alison Cimmet), Nurse (Felicity Jones Latta), Juliet (Nicole Rodenburg)

As Nurse, Juliet’s only confidante, Felicity Jones Latta is a major asset of the production, likeable but also garrulous and apt to please rather than help. Due to his education, Nurse looks to Friar Laurence (Peter Francis James), Romeo’s only confidante, but that is also a fault. Here, the Friar is not overweening—hoping to teach a lesson to the warring houses of Capulet and Montague—so much as he is overwhelmed by the passion his young friends display. James gives to the Friar’s scenes with both Romeo and Juliet an anxiousness that lets us see how trying their conviction can seem to older and more retiring heads. He has passions of his own, though, and we see them all too well when his fanciful plan goes so horribly awry.

Foreground: Juliet (Nicole Rodenburg), Romeo (James Cusati-Moyer); Friar Laurence (Peter Francis James)

For ultimately, as this careful and deliberate production shows, the tragedy comes from misplaced faith. Rather than simply fly away together and take the consequences, the lovers allow themselves to be steered by their elders. And yet—so cunning is fate—the decisive blow (much as Romeo’s well-meaning interference cost Mercutio his life) comes from Romeo’s friend Balthasar, trying to do well.

As Mercutio, Patrick Andrews is a lusty showboat rather than a poetic fop besieged by his own imaginings, as is often the case. I begin to despair of ever finding an actor and director equal to trusting Mercutio’s language to do its work without broad gestures and hamming. Dave Register looks and acts “king of the cats” enough as Tybalt, and Tyler Fauntleroy’s Benvolio is quite able. As Montague’s wife, Barbara Hentschel wails well—we can believe she could die of grief, as indeed she does, before the worst arrives.

the Cast of Romeo & Juliet; center: Benvolio (Tyler Fauntleroy), Tybalt (Dave Register)

Viewers who want to fall in love with the lovers may find that the principals in Lamos’ Romeo and Juliet don’t court favor to that degree. Rodenburg registers uplift well, and her Juliet is quite her father’s daughter in her emphatic will. Cusati-Moyer made me consider Romeo for the first time as a tragic hero, his fault the vain belief that being good will do him good. The couple’s attachment seems to be for themselves alone and not a spectacle, which, to my mind, gives them a dignity beyond their years. And that is what makes them, ultimately, a hard lesson against long-standing feuds, and so uniquely matched, in love and in death.

Rather than treat Romeo and Juliet as something to be made anew, Mark Lamos’ production made me rethink what I thought I knew.

Romeo and Juliet
By William Shakespeare
Directed by Mark Lamos

Scenic Design: Michael Yeargan; Costume Design: Fabian Fidel Aguilar; Lighting Design: Matthew Richards; Sound Design: David Budries; Voice and Speech Consultant: Shane Ann Younts; Fight Director: Michael Rossmy; Props and Set Dressing: Faye Armon-Troncoso; Dramaturg: Milla Riggio; Casting: Tara Rubin Casting, Laura Schutzel, CSA; Production Stage Manager: Megan Smith

Cast: Patrick Andrews, Chris Bolan, J. Kenneth Campbell, Alison Cimmet, Adam Coy, James Cusati-Moyer, Tyler Fauntleroy, Cole Francum, Barbara Hentschel, Peter Francis James, Felicity Jones Latta, Jim Ludlum, Peter Molesworth, Dave Register, Nicole Rodenburg, Triney Sandoval, Becca Schneider, Clay Singer, Emily Vrissis, Jamil Zraikat

Westport Country Playhouse
October 31-November 19, 2017