Ethan Frome at the Lookingglass Theater Chicago
The Berkshires Travel West
By: Susan Hall - Mar 21, 2011
Ethan Frome
Written and directed by Laura Eason
Adapted from the novel by Edith Wharton
Lookingglass Theater, Chicago
March 19, 2011
Cast
Mattie Silver Louise Lamson
Harmon Brand and Others Erik Lochtenfeld
Ethan Frome Philip R. Smith
Zenobia Frome Lisa Tejero
Henry Morton Andrew White
Scenic designer Daniel Ostling, USA
Costumes Mara Blumenfeld USA
Lighting CHristine Binder, USA
Sound Rick Sims
Composer Kevin O'Donnell
We entered the new Lookingglass Theater through the Waterworks on Chicago Avenue and Michigan Avenue. Peering through transparent plastic, the old piping wrapped in white asbestos-like cloth twists and turns. Inside, the theater is charming with a thrust stage surrounded by three sections of tiered seats. Above is a balcony.
In this production of Ethan Frome, the frame of a house looks like a cage. And for the Fromes and Mrs. Frome's cousin Mattie, the world certainly gets narrower and narrower, more and more restrictive. The costumes, the movements of the characters, the spare, bare kitchen, all reflect a noose tightening on their lives.
Outside in a brutal Berkshires winter, two birch trees are sometimes battered and bruised by the winds. There are suggestions that spring never comes, and in a metaphorical sense it does not.
Edith Wharton built her magnificent home, the Mount, here, on very different land and in very different circumstances. Where Ethan Frome can not imagine how to get the ten dollars he needs, Wharton never had a worry about money. She also succeeded in un-trapping herself, She had a love affair with journalist Morton Fullerton while her husband entertained trollopes in Boston. She divorced Wharton and lived in Europe for much of her life. Her best friends were Henry James and Bernard Berenson.
She wrote, however, about what she knew in America -- the real problems of her social class.. A story about a sledding accident near The Mount captured her attention and from this tale she wove Ethan Frome, her only work placed in a world very different from her own, a world of poverty. The Frome setting is a Hardy world of harsh, violent natural forces..
The stage story is told, as Wharton's is, by an outsider who arrives in town years after the accident. No one will tell him what happened. Played sympathetically by Erik Lochtefeld, you understand why Ethan opened his world to him for a moment, and gave him some foundation for the tale he constructs before us in the play.
Frome married Zeena who had come to help with his ailing mother. It was not so much that he owed it to her, although neighbors discussed this as cause, but rather that he did not want to be alone and go mad. He thought looking back that if his mother died in the spring and not the winter he would not have needed the consolation of another person so quickly. Ethan Frome is titled Winter in its French edition.
Laura Eason adapted the play from the novel. Phillip R. Smith stars in the title role. His portrayal of an emotionally pent up young man who has poetric feelings for nature and the world around him, and whose soul is not satisfied until Cousin Mattie arrives in the household, is riveting. It is not that he is tongue-tied, but rather that his logging, his farm, his wife and his moral code tie him in knots. In the end, poverty means that he has no choices at all. As the play progresses, he allows himself to think about an alternative life, with a woman he has feelings for, and a job he might enjoy like engineering, which he had studied in Worcester for a year before he had to come home to the Berkshires to tend to ailing parents. He has one hired hand, portrayed by the touching Andrew White.
Lisa Tejero plays Zeena Frome, and seamlessly weaves her web by letting Mattie and her husand entrap themselves. Mattie's dewy-eyed freshness is tossed up like a dance by Louise Lamson. It is easy to see why Ethan is smitten, even though all occasions inform against them.
Simple stage props like a carriage constructed as a stripped down moving cart, which also functions as a vehicle to move logs and a whirling platform twirled to suggest sledding down an endless slope, are effective and also in their simplicity reflect that bare bones life the principals lead.
Unlike Romeo and Juliet and Aida and Radames, the death Ethan and Mattie decide on is denied them. Instead they are left to lead a life in which the endless sound and fury signify nothing.
The Lookingglass production captures the spirit of the story and the Berkshires admirably. When you tire of the Berkshires winter, come at see it in this splendid production.
Playing through April 17, 2011.
Tickets at lookingglasstheater.org.