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Ethan Frome

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Media Reviews



Atlanta Theatre Buzz:
Durance Bleak
04/02/2010
Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome is a bleak man. The wintry landscape of Starkfield Mass has entered his life with a chill that freezes to the bone. He is a large man, crushed by a bleak marriage and a bleak life. And yet, his story, as told in this stage adaptation by Shakespeare & Co's Dennis Krausnick, embraces the bleakness like a winter coat, and puts the story in an oddly cheerful narration by actor Paul Hester.

As in Wharton's original 1911 novel, the narrator visits Starkfield and becomes intrigued by hulking and crippled Ethan Frome. Getting little information about the man from the taciturn townsfolk, he hires Ethan as a temporary driver, and, one blizzard night, must take shelter in Frome's prison-like farmhouse, where the full story comes out. It is a bleak story of a marriage gone wrong, a forbidden passion that threatens to thaw the ice at the core of the story, and a sledding accident that seals the next two decades of bleak existence, a wintry chill that New England summers cannot hope to thaw.

Paul Hester is our way into this story, a blithely pleasant fellow who cannot help but be intrigued by the lives of those quieter than himself. It is through him we learn of Ethan's life, and he is our protection, our shield that keeps the frosty heart from creeping from the stage to our own hearts. Yes, it's a cold and depressing tale, but one that does not leave us cold and depressed ourselves.

Through Mr. Hester, we learn that Ethan Frome is a man given to the care of others. Sacrificing his own happiness to care for his sickly mother, he hires a local spinster, Zeena, to help with the day-to-day chores of long-term care. Zeena is a woman born to serve, obsessed with the car of the ailing. When Ethan's mother is finally at rest, Zeena is left adrift. And Ethan, unable to bear the thought of solitude in this house-but-never-home, marries her.

Stripped of her purpose in life, Zeena becomes sickly herself, calling on Ethan to now be her caregiver. A young aid, Mattie, enters the picture and the foundations for a plot that traps all three in icy steel are laid.

As basic as this sounds, there are surprises in store, including a final shocker I was certainly not expecting (believe it or not, this is one work that escaped my English-major college years, and I've never actually read it). At a crisp 90 minutes, the story is over before it has a chance to depress, and I was left with an ache of sorrow, a pleasant sadness that a story about obsessive care-giving could be so, well, so bleak.

A white and grey set with a water-wheel frozen in ice provides the platform for these characters, and four actors (and two rollaway dummies) play them all. Occasionally, they don grey robes to move set pieces or manipulate the "townspeople" dummies, or just hover in the background. Mr. Hester is the flash of color that throws them all into perspective.

Robin Bloodworth plays Frome with a limp and a scowl and an overpowering presence that makes us understand the narrator's interest in him. Ellen McQueen gives us a starchy Zeena who is surprisingly approachable and almost likeable in her early scenes. And Erica Honeycutt, quiet and withdrawn as Mattie, is nevertheless alluring and even pitiable - her softness of voice and sometimes hunched posture suggests a woman already cowed by that blank landscape, that harsh mistress, that hopeless outlook. Every aspect of this production works to give us a wintry story that is compelling and memorable.

This show is an example of that old adage that there is nothing depressing about a depressing story if it is done well (with the converse, even a happy story done badly can be depressing). Paul Hester gives another in a series of wonderful performances that bring us into this story, and takes us back safely to the warm comfort of our own lives, lives hopefully free of the bleak durance endured by these denizens of Starkfield, Massachusetts.

As our own winter melts towards spring, it is harsh reminder of the cold days that will soon be left behind.



Atlanta Theatre Buzz:
Durance Bleak
04/02/2010
Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome is a bleak man. The wintry landscape of Starkfield Mass has entered his life with a chill that freezes to the bone. He is a large man, crushed by a bleak marriage and a bleak life. And yet, his story, as told in this stage adaptation by Shakespeare & Co's Dennis Krausnick, embraces the bleakness like a winter coat, and puts the story in an oddly cheerful narration by actor Paul Hester.

As in Wharton's original 1911 novel, the narrator visits Starkfield and becomes intrigued by hulking and crippled Ethan Frome. Getting little information about the man from the taciturn townsfolk, he hires Ethan as a temporary driver, and, one blizzard night, must take shelter in Frome's prison-like farmhouse, where the full story comes out. It is a bleak story of a marriage gone wrong, a forbidden passion that threatens to thaw the ice at the core of the story, and a sledding accident that seals the next two decades of bleak existence, a wintry chill that New England summers cannot hope to thaw.

Paul Hester is our way into this story, a blithely pleasant fellow who cannot help but be intrigued by the lives of those quieter than himself. It is through him we learn of Ethan's life, and he is our protection, our shield that keeps the frosty heart from creeping from the stage to our own hearts. Yes, it's a cold and depressing tale, but one that does not leave us cold and depressed ourselves.

Through Mr. Hester, we learn that Ethan Frome is a man given to the care of others. Sacrificing his own happiness to care for his sickly mother, he hires a local spinster, Zeena, to help with the day-to-day chores of long-term care. Zeena is a woman born to serve, obsessed with the car of the ailing. When Ethan's mother is finally at rest, Zeena is left adrift. And Ethan, unable to bear the thought of solitude in this house-but-never-home, marries her.

Stripped of her purpose in life, Zeena becomes sickly herself, calling on Ethan to now be her caregiver. A young aid, Mattie, enters the picture and the foundations for a plot that traps all three in icy steel are laid.

As basic as this sounds, there are surprises in store, including a final shocker I was certainly not expecting (believe it or not, this is one work that escaped my English-major college years, and I've never actually read it). At a crisp 90 minutes, the story is over before it has a chance to depress, and I was left with an ache of sorrow, a pleasant sadness that a story about obsessive care-giving could be so, well, so bleak.

A white and grey set with a water-wheel frozen in ice provides the platform for these characters, and four actors (and two rollaway dummies) play them all. Occasionally, they don grey robes to move set pieces or manipulate the "townspeople" dummies, or just hover in the background. Mr. Hester is the flash of color that throws them all into perspective.

Robin Bloodworth plays Frome with a limp and a scowl and an overpowering presence that makes us understand the narrator's interest in him. Ellen McQueen gives us a starchy Zeena who is surprisingly approachable and almost likeable in her early scenes. And Erica Honeycutt, quiet and withdrawn as Mattie, is nevertheless alluring and even pitiable - her softness of voice and sometimes hunched posture suggests a woman already cowed by that blank landscape, that harsh mistress, that hopeless outlook. Every aspect of this production works to give us a wintry story that is compelling and memorable.

This show is an example of that old adage that there is nothing depressing about a depressing story if it is done well (with the converse, even a happy story done badly can be depressing). Paul Hester gives another in a series of wonderful performances that bring us into this story, and takes us back safely to the warm comfort of our own lives, lives hopefully free of the bleak durance endured by these denizens of Starkfield, Massachusetts.

As our own winter melts towards spring, it is harsh reminder of the cold days that will soon be left behind.



Atlanta Journal Constitution:
Ethan Frome at Theatre in the Square
03/31/2010
When the most arresting development in the play involves a broken pickle dish, or when some of its more memorable characters take shape as makeshift tailor’s dummies with prerecorded voices, something is clearly amiss about Theatre in the Square’s bleak Ethan Frome.

Part of the problem, no doubt, is Dennis Krausnick’s slight and sloppy adaptation of Edith Wharton’s foreboding 1911 novel, in which a woebegone New England farmer, trapped with a domineering wife, falls for her comely nursemaid. But director James Donadio’s static Square staging — with largely lackluster performances by a four-person cast — doesn’t help.

Robin Bloodworth meanders through the title role as if dazed and confused. That isn’t so bad in the latter segments of the story, after a tragedy leaves Ethan with a limp and a distorted face. Elsewhere, however, the actor rarely reveals much of an emotional dimension to the character. His scenes with the wife lack tension; his scenes with the girl feel dispassionate. As a man presumably hardened by life and shaken with “deep anxiety,” he only skims the surface.

Although she occasionally seems to be channeling Katharine Hepburn, with her pronounced accent and stiff posture, Ellen McQueen fares somewhat better as the shrewish Zeena. Krausnick’s condensed version of events makes it none too easy, leaving a lot of the wife’s motivations out in the cold. Suffice it to say, one minute she’s just what Ethan ordered, the next a possibly pathological ball and chain.

Newcomer Erica Honeycutt is pleasant but unremarkable as the young woman who alters their lives. Her romantic chemistry with Bloodworth is negligible, and so is any sense of wonderment about discovering the world “through different eyes” (his). The ordinarily resourceful Paul Hester struggles to adequately distinguish between a number of smaller roles.

Donadio’s production is also plagued from a design standpoint. With four actors, three cloaked stagehands and a couple of those rolling stick figures on hand at any given time, the Marietta theater’s intimate space is often too congested to properly reflect the desolation of the characters or their environment.

Kat Conley drapes her set in snowy whites, but a large cutout of a sawmill wheel obscures our view of an upstairs room in the farmhouse. Despite his periodic use of a strobe, Mike Post’s lighting is otherwise murky: when Bloodworth stands in front of a simulated fireplace, or McQueen sits up in bed, their faces remain shrouded in darkness as they speak.

Slowly paced, and relying more heavily on narrated exposition than on well-defined characterization, Ethan Frome has a peculiarly enervating effect — a drama about the “striking ruin” of a man that isn’t very striking.

Bottom Line: A dreary story, told drearily.





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