"handsomely mounted... dynamically presented"

Sept. 14, 2002 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

The Scarlet Letter, Carol Gilligan’s adaptation of Hawthorne’s novel now playing at Shakespeare and Co’s Founders Theatre (shakespeare.org), is handsomely mounted and dynamically presented.

The lead actors are strong and well-cast, the grey, white and black costuming evokes the Puritan restraints that contrast so strongly with the scarlet A worn by the heroine and the colorful dresses of her ill-begotten child, and the scaffold which figures so dramatically in the plot is cleverly designed so serve other scenic purposes.

The plot is episodic covering seven years in the life of Hester Prynne (Jennie Israel) who in l7th century Massachusetts had the audacity to bear an illegitimate child and decline to admit who the father was.

That the father was the colony’s respected minister, Reverend Dimmesdale, (Jason Asprey) and that Hester’s husband, thought to be dead, was alive and could return to the colony calling himself Martin Chillingworth (Michael Hammond) complicates the situation.

Although Hawthorne, having been raised among free-thinking women, was ahead of his time in his sympathy for his heroine and gave her lines of a strong feminist slant, Gilligan not only used them but high-lighted them and added to them especially in the minister’s “Elect “ sermon in which at last Dimmesdale can admit his role and challenge the Puritan belief that only certain ones had been chosen by God to be elect.

She also dramatized Hawthorne’s little epilog in which he moves the child of sin, little Pearl, played by Kate Holland, into a more enlightened world.

Jennie Israel as Hester, commands our respect from her first moments on the scaffold. She is distraught and maligned and the child on her breast screams as loudly as the letter that proclaims her adultery, but she carries on in her shame and disgrace, stronger than the men about her. She is especially strong in the forest scene in which she almost “saves” Dimmesdale, and in is appealing in her troubled relationship with her pert child.

As Dimmesdale, Jason Asprey has the most difficult role in the play and handles it with distinction. As Hawthorne has conceived him, he is a guilt ridden figure but one who at the very end rises to greatness. This demands subtle playing and Asprey gives it to us. He negotiates his path between piety and guilt with a wide range of vocal delivery. He can be to the townspeople, the gentle-voiced leader they respect, and can, in the forest, be the angered bewildered man who refuses to forgive Hester and then sobs in her arms.

Hammond as Roger Chillingworth, the returned husband, is commanding. He is the villain of the piece but carefully never over-plays it. His menace is far more deadly because he does not, and is silently present even in scenes in which he is only a watcher.

Although program notes call attention to Gilligan’s feminist stress, the themes are already there in the novel especially in a prose chapter “Another View of Hester” and in the epilog which she has dramatized. Wisely she has employed most of Hawthorne’s own dialog elsewhere and has articulated clearly and forcefully the message Hawthorne was struggling to express.

This is mainly a strong play and was enthusiastically received by the opening night audience. It will have a long run though November 3, and will have seven Friday morning matinees for school children—a real boon since the book is one often taught in secondary schools.

My only caveats were:
The casting of an adult, small though she was, for the child Pearl. Although Holland moved well, she was too tall and too old. One realizes the difficulty of having a child in a long running play, but perhaps two or three talented and pert little girls could have been found to rotate in the role.

The problem that adapting a novel makes for numerous scenes that do not easily break into dramatic climaxes for intermissions. As played, the first act is over long. Although modern playing, including that of Shakespeare, seems to opt for one intermission, this play would be better served by two, the first coming after scene six, the second scaffold scene. Not ideal but would help.

However, this is a strong play, well acted and well directed and one well worth seeing. Author and director have been sensitively aware of the symbols threading the script. The weeds and flowers are there. And little Pearl evokes the image of the “rose plucked from the prison door”—though she should pick roses in the Governor’s garden.

(Added note of possible Berkshire interest. Some of the important action of the play centers on the night Governor John Winthrop, founder of the Colony, died. Governor John Winthrop was the ancestor of Granville Winthrop whose estate in Lenox for 25 years housed the Windsor Mountain School and is now the summer home of BU and the winter home of BCD – 2)