Ethan Frome

Lookingglass Theatre Company

Chicago, (312) 337-0665

**

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The “spare and pared-to-the-bone” style of this new production aptly matches the substance of its story, said Hedy Weiss in the Chicago Sun-Times. In Laura Eason’s adaptation of Edith Wharton’s century-old novella, the “stripped-down dialogue” reflects both the bleakness of the setting—a New England mill town named Starkfield—and the repressed passion that arises between the title character and the young caretaker of his dour and ailing wife. Eason’s retelling “potently captures the cruel destiny” of Frome, who “ultimately cannot take the leap required” to escape his dreary existence by acting on his attraction to the younger woman, Mattie Silver. Tensions rise until a climactic, “thrillingly staged” sledding accident that leaves both Ethan and Mattie disfigured.

Eason’s production is definitely an “honorable endeavor,” said Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune. But the challenges of tackling a story that’s both “geographically tiny and emotionally massive” ultimately prove too much for the writer-director. This show lacks the novella’s sense of foreboding and inevitability, and, most crucially, the “dangerous passion” that remains the lifeblood of Wharton’s story. The cast displays a near-suffocating amount of restraint, apparently “fearful of overplaying the feverish actions of their characters.” While it’s often fitting that Ethan and Mattie seem hamstrung by multiple layers of emotional repression, it would have been nice, especially “as we approach the rush of their fate,” if the performers’ conduct weren’t so consistently genteel.