"creatively envisioned and dynamically acted"

September 13, 2003 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

Ethan Frome one of the two novels in Edith Wharton's vast oevre that takes place in the Berkshires, carries special resonance in Lenox. Daily, many of us traverse the very hill, Old Stockbridge Road down from the Monument to Hawthorne Street, where a hundred years ago that tragic sledding accident that inspired the novel (and its very different characters and plot) occurred.

So vivid is that hill, and the long ago elm tree at its foot into which the sled crashed, that when I first rented the movie of Frome, the clerk, asking me if I lived in Lenox and getting an affirmative reply remarked acidly, "Then you won't like it. Nobody in Lenox does. Wrong hill."

And it was. And I didn't like it, despite being a Liam Neisen fan. They didn't get it right.

Dennis Krausnick, director and adapter of the current production of Ethan Frome at Shakespeare and Co.'s Founders Theatre, gets it right.

He has converted Wharton's novel into a gripping play in which, using only four actors and a simple, but imaginative use of the thrust stage, brings the haunting, passionate love triangle into dynamic immediacy. Right hill! His creative staging of the accident is inspired.

Indeed the whole production is a dynamic one played out with passion and simplicity on the stage backed by Kris Stone's backdrop of lonely, confining trees above which broods a ghostly graveyard of slanting stones and lost hopes.

Ethan's story begins at the end. Twenty years after the accident when a young engineer, Homer Winterson (Steve Boss), comes to Starkfield and, observing the crippled defeated man Ethan has become, wonders about his story.

The story and the play end when Witherson for the first time enters Ethan's kitchen and understands.

The main plot, framed by these two moments is a series of flash-backs in which we, along with Witherson, who serves as narrator and a chorus of town characters, learn of Ethan's star-crossed love and hopes and ironic defeat.

The three actors who thread out Ethan's story are so finely honed and their acting so natural and believable that one is easily swept into their story of love and desperation.

The taciturn middle-aged Ethan of the story's frame (Kevin Coleman) is still young and full of dreams of escape. But trapping poverty is everywhere. He innocently, and disastrously, marries a young woman who comes to help with his dying mother, only to have her turn into a nagging hypochondriac (Mary Guzzy) for whom he must employ household help. He brings into his home the young Mattie Silver (Elizabeth Aspenlieder), a sweet young innocent, but full of a passionate intensity. She cannot help falling in love with the young handsome Ethan though she has no thoughts of seduction.

Their love happens without their willing it. And of course there is no escape. That a broken dish, one that Ethan's wife treasured, precipitates the tragedy is only a reminder of the poverty in the characters lives. They cannot escape and their attempt leads only to the play's ironic conclusion.

Steve Boss as narrator and chorus handles his difficult role with skill and flexibility, framing the action, taking part in it, and moving the story along. His role is a nuanced one that at times works better than others in terms of the script, a delicately juggling one for both adapter and actor, and one demanding he work within the play and outside it. Within it he is the young engineer riding through the snow with Ethan or briefly slipping into the role of the dying mother (and later her over-arching ghost).

Mostly this worked although at times some of the briefly evoked townspeople might have been more effective if only suggested.

However, this is a fine staging of the book, creatively envisioned and dynamically acted. Coleman slips with such apparent ease into the two Ethans - giving us the innocent, imaginative, gentle and yearning young man and the magnificently played cripple. Aspenlieder is wonderful, eager and appealing - capable of hysterics over a broken dish and of urgent argument over seating on the sled with the implications it brings. Gussi is flawless as the unpleasant Zenobia. To have this play running for two months this Fall in the Berkshires, with special matinees for high school students, for whom the novel is an often assigned text, is a tremendous boon.

This is a good play in a fine production well handled by director and actors. The brief sledding scene alone is worth the price of admission.