an interesting play...will intrigue its audiences

June 10, 2005 performance, reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

Joan Ackermann’s Ice Glen, now playing at Shakespeare and Company’s Springlawn Theatre, is an engrossing, if convoluted, play that is gallantly, and at times, brilliantly presented by its six actor cast under the creative direction of Tina Packer.

The plot could be cliché and never is. Set in a decaying Lenox mansion early in the 20th century, it centers around a poet who defies efforts to have her works published. But Sarah Harding is no reclusive Dickinson in Amherst, nor flamboyant Millay at Steepletop, she is very much her own person and so protective of words and experiences ("a bear has passed through her hands") that the printing of them would be a betrayal.

Two years before the play’s opening, the building's owner, Samuel Bainbridge, has died, leaving his young widow, Dulce, to cope with a mansion in decay, staffed by two faithful old retainers and the outside help of a half-wittted local boy and Sarah, the poet-gardener rescued and befriended by Bainbridge.

Before his death, Bainbridge had entrusted to Edith Wharton three of Sarah’s poems, which belatedly have made their way to Peter Woodward, a Boston magazine editor, so eager to publish them that he comes to the Berkshires to plead for them in person, having not gotten responses to his letters about publishing them.

His meeting with Sarah and his walk alone through the Ice Glen change his life, and his visit stirs up passions and wheels within wheels in both the upstairs and downstairs life of the household.

Ackermann creates characters that are real, with voices of their own, and sets them in situations full of poignancy, humor, tension, and pathos. Her script, however, demands twelve realistic settings, including:

• up stairs,
• down stairs,
• outdoors,
• indoors,
• Lenox,
• Boston;

It would more easily be staged as a movie than as a realistic play (that also transcends realism and moves into symbolism) in the small playing area at Springlawn.

This production copes valiantly with the play’s very real demands. The polished silver on the long dinner table shines even though there is a visible patch on the ceiling screaming of a rotting roof; leaves fall evoking Fall and bring nature into the very playing area in a charming scene between Sarah and the adolescent town boy.(Although here the temptation to steal echoes of the sled scene from Ethan Frome were too evident.)

The acting in this production is outstanding. Elizabeth Aspenlieder as Dulce presents the strongest, most-focused character in her long and admirable career at Shakespeare and Co. During the play she moves from reserve and restraint to arch and seductive, and in a marvelous scene with Woodward in Boston, in rapid-fire, withering words, gives him up.

Michael Hammond, well-known for the depth of his character roles, is so clear, natural and convincing, timing each move and word with such apparent ease that one is with him all the way, believing his lonely walk in Ice Glen and his unrequited love for Sarah could indeed so change him.

Sarah is Sarah. Feisty, red-haired, as attuned to the nature around her as to the words that color her life. And she is faithful to the bear that saved her. Kristin Wold inhabits this character with a defiant strength.

Supporting actor Gillian Seidl as the cook whom, one feels, has grown old here in kitchen, brings humor and reality into her scenes and is especially delightful when she holds forth on how one best makes turtle soup.

Dennis Krausnick’s butler is so capably and quietly real, one knows he has been in the house since the days of its early grandeur. He calmly and respectfully sees that, despite the estate having fallen on hard times, things will attempt to go as smoothly and as correctly as he knows they should. He has one small cameo scene with Woodward and plays it movingly.

As Denby, the village boy, Brian Weaver creates a charming, funny, and at times moving character, one intrigued by the nature around him, confused by his own adolescent urges, and especially trusting of Sarah.

Govane Lohbauer’s costumes, always on the mark, are especially delightful in the fallen grandeur of Dulce, "dressed to kill" as she makes her play for Woodward. Those worn by the cook are humbly and fittingly right in the kitchen, but also right in their touching attempt to serving a dinner in the grandeur the house once had.

Summing up: This is an interesting play, if a somewhat flawed one, at least for production in such a small space. It needs room to expand into, to bring its symbols to more glowing life, making it easier to follow and perhaps making clearer the final scene in which mysteries are untangled and loves unrequited.

However, Packer has managed to use the space in imaginative ways, including one triangle approach that briefly lets three areas work at the same time.

Ice Glen will be playing all summer and will intrigue its audiences, although they may wish it could expand beyond the confines of its stage. Although it has been presented elsewhere, challenged in Minnesota, but, one gathers, successfully in Florida, the play, as a play, still seems a work in progress that may change during its long run, and that too can be an exciting experience to witness.