An Essay Broken into Seven Discrete Sections, Well-Marked, All of Which are Optional, So That You May Pick and Choose According to Your Interests and Wishes & Available Time
- Three Ways to Stage a Chestnut
- The Heiress: Not a Chestnut and Nothing Like One, Not Even Close
- Henry James and His Metaphorical Naïfs
- Literary Realism & The Whole Gist of This
- Fragmentation, Perception, and the Singular Self (or, The Period of Time When Henry James, His Famous Brother William (As Well As Their Parenthetical Sister, Alice, Who Also Wrote), Were All Happening, Contiguous With Literary Realism, Existentialism &c.. All in All a Bit of An Uproar)
- Social Mores & Henry James, c. 1880
- Wherein the Play Itself is Discussed
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“
You know him.
I love
him.“ —Catherine Sloper,
The Heiress
1—Three Ways to Stage a Chestnut
Prior to seeing the Jungle’s production of
The Heiress, I thought that pretty much there were two ways to do an old chestnut of a play. One: You can sigh and simply do it. Put on the play, clutter the stage with era-appropriate artifacts, set it in the room (a chestnut is nearly always set in a room, a drawing room, a living room, a parlor, etc), wood-paneled, with imposing bookshelves holding weighty tomes in red leather, an uncomfortable velveteen settee and 1-2 stiff-backed chairs, in which the players of this chestnut play will have their conversation about something agreeable, there are some frosted glass lamps, some dainty lace, a writing desk at which plot-turning letters are to be written with pen or quill, and there are women in glorious dresses who do needlepoint neatly while the real characters—generally some fellows in dashing outfits (curiously clean soldiers, dashingly well-dressed rakes) of some kind, and often a mouthy woman who causes much uproar with her sassy, clever little mouth—and the sassy woman mostly has female cousins, occasionally sisters, much plainer & duller than she, not nearly as apt to catch a husband by the end o’ the play, at which time all will have been mostly restored to the pre-play orderly order of things.
The second way to do a chestnut: you can interpret it in some possibly daring sort of way, effected usually by changing the setting to Present-Day Somewhere, updating costumes and clutter and social context, and the audience will love it or hate it, depending on their taste for reassuring or mildly disruptive theater, and it will be great or fall flat, because it really might bring new meaning to an old play, or it very well could be a bit of a bore, or, as in the Royal Shakespeare Co.’s reinterp of
Shrew last year, it could be so mind-bogglingly ill-advised, muddled, and misogynistic as to defy reason or even passing understanding, which is a dramatic effect generally one likes to avoid.
But there is a third way to do a chestnut. There is the option, not often exercised, to undo and remake the play entirely. Unravel the lace, rip down the heavy curtains, overturn the settee, disorder the order, confound expectations, and cut away at the play until you are staring at its bloody heart.
That is what the Jungle has done with this production of
The Heiress. And it’s done with such fineness, detail, and precision that not a book on the shelf needs to shift, not a mote of dust need move. As we settle into our comfy seats, we prepare to watch nothing happen and nothing substantively change on the stage, where we see our modest young ladies and their besotted young men, and the meddlesome aunt, the Cockney maid, the pompous unfeeling father, etc. We are lulled, entirely unprepared for a play that plays an almost lighthearted, ultimately Machiavellian game—unsettling in its exquisite politesse—of illusion, perception, and power. The beautifully cast actors, particularly the astonishing Kate Guentzel in the lead role Catherine, deftly dismantle the audience’s expectations as the play unfolds, leaving a lingering afterimage that blurs what is true, what is real, in our understanding of each other, our motives, our lives, and ourselves.
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2—The Heiress: Not a Chestnut and Nothing Like One, Not Even Close
I am sans script, so I’m unsure as to whether the subtle, lighthearted, violently perfect
Heiress at the Jungle is so good because the script (adapted by Ruth and Augustus Goetz) is strong, or because it’s a particularly true interpretation of
Washington Square, the Henry James novella on which it is based. (There are several plot points and characters excised, but one doesn’t miss them—a superfluous brother, two boring suitors, etc.) I can’t say whether
The Heiress even has the bones of a good play in its own right; I have seen some deeply dull productions and some really crummy films of it, no matter how many Oscars those blah films may have won. I can say only that the exceptional (like,
off the charts exceptional) cast, plus Bain Boehlke’s direction and design, plus Kate Guentzel’s singular, stunning performance as Catherine Sloper, come together to create an improbably powerful production of a chestnut that is
not at all a chestnut but rather a powerful play that has left me unsettled and disoriented, my own sense of the world torqued by the polished, disturbing, finally devastating world that this production brings to life.
The Jungle’s rare, fine interpretation of
Heiress uncovers and explores the irrevocable fissure between perception and truth, feeling along the terrible divide between one self and another, when each is trapped in the penumbra of all we cannot and will not ever know.
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3—Henry James and His Metaphorical Naïfs
The storyline is familiar, especially to readers of Henry James. James (who hated this novella and would not include it in his collected works) had a particular liking for the wide-eyed, innocent, unsullied, delicate, decorous, well-bred, modest, super moral naïf who has, or is about to, come into a considerable inheritance.
Washington Square, like a number of James’ stories and books, uses the as-yet unformed person of the young lady as a kind of screen onto which he can project the larger drama he saw at work in the world—the psychic and social struggle between freedom and oppression, Europe and America, strength and weakness, knowledge and ignorance, and in his work these things crystalize in stories where the last of the Old World noblesse oblige chafes against the grit of the striving, hungry middle class in the New.
James’ young ladies were legion, and, at least as he wrote them, largely metaphorical, standing in for that which is vulnerable to and victimized by the pull and sway of real power.
Portrait of a Lady is the best known of James’ heiress stories, and
Wings of the Dove, another heiress story, perhaps the best of his later works; both follow that same narrative arc of innocent, vulnerable girl morphing into a more fully-evolved life form capable of abstract thought. The young ladies set forth on their modest adventures, from chair to settee & so forth, frivolous and ditzy but good-natured and easily trained, much like very intelligent dogs. They are unschooled in the ways of the world, and this puts them at grave risk of exploitation by bad things, especially men, especially mercenary middle-class but persuasively handsome men with Anglophile ambitions, who pose as suitors but are really after the ladies’ money, etc. These men, all of them erstwhile lovers and pretenders to the rich father’s throne, stand in sharp opposition to the women: where the women are ambient creatures whose will and lives are shaped and controlled by other, more powerful forces than themselves, the young men are smart, sharp-eyed as foxes, devilishly good looking and dripping with charm. As metaphors, they stand in for that which is slick, new, false, unworthy, and untrue.
The upshot of a Henry James story is that (as recommended in Creative Writing 101) Something Happens, and what happens is that our characters Change. That change, in James, consists of our heroine, the hapless heiress, does something to illustrate her (may I repeat) naivety (generally she is swayed by the lavish attentions of a lout or a rake, or a lout
and a rake and a bum, and falls in love with him). Next, she bumps into the painful reality that life is not fair, wrings her hands, weeps, is consoled, then straightens up and proclaims something bravely, and neatly hatches into the quasi-adulthood that was the upper limit of most women’s lives at the time when James wrote.
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4—Literary Realism & The Whole Gist of This
The running critical line on James is that his early version of literary realism—not yet the dated, fusty drawing room novels his would become in later generations’ eyes—was chock full of psychological insight and nuanced characterization. In the context of contemporary fiction, James isn’t revolutionary, but in the 1880s, his use of the interior point of view, stream of consciousness narration, and unreliable narrators, was an entirely new approach to characterization. His novels infuriated and deeply influenced the work of both James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, who more fully and more radically explored the inner human world, particularly the interior world of women’s minds.
Whatever we may think of their plots, whatever we think of the ridiculous notions that continue to drive and inform our own lives, the early literary realists share an interpretation of reality, of personality, and of truth that is, if not frightening exactly, then unsettling at least. Drilling in through the character’s eye, these writers take up residence in that character’s mind, and there they watch thought and emotion as they occur—darting away in an instant, taking shape and disappearing, re-appearing and transforming, doing the usual work of thoughts: making and unmaking the character’s (and our) very self in a fraction of a breath.
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5—Fragmentation, Perception, and the Singular Self (or, The Period of Time When Henry James, His Famous Brother William (As Well As Their Parenthetical Sister, Alice, Who Also Wrote), Were All Happening, Contiguous With Existentialism, etc.)
Bound up in and inextricable from this era’s writing—not just fiction but also drama, poetry, and essay were drawn in—was the eroding belief in a singular, solid self. While the scribblers of every genre looked on, scribbling, Darwin precisely and quickly dismantled an absolute god, and psychoanalysis largely dismembered our idea of a static, knowable creature called Man. In his writing, Henry James followed his older brother—the psychologist William James—waded into the murk of human makeup and motivation; both men (and their distressingly parenthetical sister, diarist Alice James) made careers of the search for what the human character really is—if it is anything all.
The realists saw a fragmented, incomplete self—the individual as nothing more than fractals of subjective consciousness and perception. The literature of this era exposes and explores the conundrum of subjectivity: objectively speaking, objective reality does not exist. It’s a dark, existential, and unnervingly apt depiction of the incomplete, impermanent human character. But James and his successors took this to a conclusion that some find even more disturbing than the cheerful notations by Nietzsche & Sartre & de Beauvoir & Co. (the business of meaninglessness & how nothing matters, not you & not me, not life and not death, and fact while we’re at it, in yet further evidence that there’s no need to worry: Nothing exists anyway! Nothing is or ever was, so we can relax).
But James—a jolly, loquacious, prolific and powerful figure in the 1800s literary world, a deeply thoughtful man of ebullient affections and relatively sound mind (Hemmingway once spoke of his envy of James, who “sat at his window and smoked a cigar and thought”), a writer whose entire faith in fiction and art hinged on its capacity to bring about joy—did a thing that seems at first glance quite benign, but isn’t. Because when you peel back the skin of James’ work—not just the grimmer pieces, but all of it—you see that he has not just captured the desperation and disorientation of selflessness, he has locked it in a suffocating drawing room and made it sit straight-backed and incessantly smile on a settee.
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6—How, in the 19th Century, Performance Was All
In the airless world of James’ high society—and in the Jungle’s marvelous production of
The Heiress—performance is all. Love is performance, courting is the performance of idealized love. Girls perform girlhood, young men learn manhood at their fathers’ knee. Mothers train daughters in the art of being modest ladies, faithful wives, adoring mothers, eventual widows, and, when they can finally slump into their last role, as agreeably nosy grandmothers or nattering aunts. Fathers are reassuringly static, bombastically always themselves, drinking brandy and smoking cigars and blustering in and out of the room, confident in the position of benign and absolute power that is, a priori, their own. One dissembles and feints, knows the steps, knows how and when to pretend, to smile, to lie. One’s manners disguise one’s motives, one’s motive is ever-present but always obscure, the individual is an unreliable narrator of his or her own story, no truth can fully be trusted, and no two perceptions will ever fully meet eye to eye.
James’ book—which he hated to have in print—explores more deeply and more darkly the human psyche and character than any of his other works, and that may have been why he disliked it so ferociously: it does not, as he believed art should, ultimately lift up the spirit and bring it joy. It does something different, delving into a feature of his own personality that I believe he did not wish to encounter in himself. Born and raised in Washington Square, the novella by that name tells the story of several lives abruptly destroyed by an all-consuming longing for more. The longing for money, property, beautiful things, the striving for a higher social status than the middle class from which James came, very quickly sets the stage for a game in which all but one of the main characters are in a terrifyingly genteel struggle for control.
In this era, performance becomes even more critical, because performance is the only thing left. And the consummate performer gets control.
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7—Wherein the Play Itself is Discussed
Here is where the Jungle’s production of
The Heiress far outstrips the original story for psychological precision and insight. Here is where it’s clearest that James and the very form of fiction fall short in their attempt to show the reader what the uncertain nature of truth looks like, how the slippery shifting of the self feels. Theater is necessary. It is the only thing that shows us, rather than tells us, about the visceral experience of being controlled. The audience remains unaware for nearly half the play that the performers so utterly control our perception that when we realize it, it’s stunning, and it’s masterfully played.
The bid for power in this play is never explicitly mentioned but patently clear, and, at first, not terribly distressing—it’s an old tale of controlling male characters over ineffectual females—but of course we’re watching an old show. It ought to be taken with a grain of salt, in the context of its time etc., even if our time is something of a warmed-over cultural past. We settle our butts into our seats, content that nothing will disrupt the actually very enjoyable experience of seeing a good old-fashioned drawing room play.
So we pine with the handsome, passionate, earnest suitor. We cringe with the heroine’s horrifying awkwardness and her abject failure—or possible unwillingness—to perform the role of mildly talented, pleasantly clever, pretty girl who will easily snag a husband. We are even persuaded, early on, to feel more or less fond of the ghastly father who terrorizes Catherine with insults of epic cruelty—a brisk, good-natured description of her as “an entirely mediocre and defenseless creature without a shred of poise” is among the more benign—and we conspire with the delightful, ridiculous Aunt Penniman (Wendy Lehr, being divine). Without thinking too hard about it, we’re gamely convinced that the characters will perform their reliable, comprehensible, lovable roles without being difficult, and that the actors will do the same.
They don’t. With a series of swift, initially imperceptible turns of character, without comment or fuss, the actors calmly cut themselves off from James’ plot and intention, invert and remake the characters James created, overturn their own roles and our reality, and completely unravel the play.
By the end of the second act, our warmest, sweetest, most innocent character, the powerless Catherine, has undergone a chilling change. She’s eerily cold, her manner, vocal tone, and every shift of muscle contained and controlled. And, as she systematically deconstructs the power structure using only a few gestures, a letter, and some words—as the all-powerful father weakens, diminishes, and is finally overpowered; as the domineering, poisonous lover is silenced, made to cower and retreat—she, with equal poise, constructs a new self, one she has written, freely chosen, and bitterly won.
The play makes its most important divergence from the James novella at the end. James leaves Catherine much unchanged, having done her part to illustrate the necessary dynamics of weakness and power. At the end of
Washington Square, we watch the lover stride out of the house for the last time, leaving the ever-hopeful, miserable Mrs. Penniman staring as he goes. James writes, “Catherine, meanwhile, in the parlour, picking up her morsel of fancy work, had seated herself with it again—for life, as it were.”
But at the end of
The Heiress, Catherine sits quietly with her embroidery while the lover bangs on the door desperately, begging her to let him in. As he howls, the maid says to Catherine uncertainly, “Ma’am?”
Catherine does not look up, and does not pause. “Bolt it,” she says.
A moment later, she stands, picks up her candle, gathers her shawl about her shoulders, and steadily ascends the stairs, her back to the door.
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