April 6–13, 2000
theater
Walnut Street Theatre, Ninth & Walnut Sts., through April 30, 215-574-3550
Oh, no! Oh, yes! It’s melodrama time again at the Walnut Street Theatre, home of the three-hour perfectly furnished, exquisitely costumed play where everybody talks very slowly and very stiltedly and the actors seem to have been exhumed after a century-long slumber. If I hadn’t seen the superb Broadway revival of The Heiress five years ago, with the magnificent Cherry Jones (who won a Tony for her performance), I’d have assumed that what was wrong on stage was the play, not the production. But….
The play is an adaptation by Ruth and Augustus Goetz of Washington Square, a novel by Henry James. The plot revolves around a young woman, Catherine Sloper (Grace Gonglewski), who is plain and shy but rich; her father (William Leach), who sees her as "a mediocre creature without a shred of poise," holds her responsible for the death of his beloved, beautiful wife in childbirth. Her aunt (Carla Belver), a silly, romantic woman, encourages her only suitor, a handsome fortune hunter (Allyn Burrows). If there is any pleasure to be had here it is in the plot’s surprises, so I won’t reveal them, although I was shocked at how much this production itself reveals, betraying its own best moments by telegraphing to the audience how things will turn out before they happen.
Henry James, the 19th-century American novelist, may have had, as T.S. Eliot said, "a mind so fine no idea could violate it," but he could out-subtle anybody. Nuance, implication, innuendo, the barest suggestion of gesture which speaks volumes, conveyed by the merest lift of an eyebrow, the most fleeting touch of a hand: This is the Jamesian world which can raise melodrama to a rarefied sphere.
This static, lifeless, clunky production of The Heiress as directed by Malcolm Black is about as Jamesian as a flounder, despite the heroic efforts of Grace Gonglewski to breathe some life into the airless world she’s trapped in. The action consists mainly of people sitting down and then standing up and then sitting down again (often in the most unlikely, unrealistic ways as if the thing to be avoided at all cost is that somebody has his or her back to the audience). Nearly everyone tends to bellow out their lines (why are they hollering in their own parlor?) and they take enormous pauses between sentences, as though they were getting paid by the hour. It’s a show lacking everything it needs except the set, and nobody wants to look at a set for three hours.