Lauren Gunderson, one of America’s most produced living playwrights, has a career-long fascination with framing devices and with pumping up the importance of the writer’s craft. Thus her very lively new adaptation of “Little Women,” which premiered Friday night at Northlight Theatre, is actually titled “Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women,” and the story of the youthful familial goings-on in Concord, New Hampshire, is bookended by Gunderson’s tribute to Alcott herself. Gunderson collapses the character of Jo into Louisa and uses Meg, Amy and Beth to not only celebrate their eldest sister but the author who made the quartet the most famous fictional American sisters in the world.
You might well watch this new staging, which feels notably influenced by Greta Gerwig’s screenplay to the 2019 movie, and find yourself just wanting to see a straight-up staging of the actual book, rather than so much authorial deification and deconstructive commentary. I had several of those moments.
But I’ve long admired the life in Gunderson’s writing, the way she fuses period interest with a contemporary sensibility (she cannot help herself) and Gunderson’s love for her characters that invariably bursts from all her scripts. She’s a commercial, populist writer at heart, which is why she has so often broken out from the pack of her more academically oriented peers, especially those scared of taking a risk or going against the boring dominant paradigm in the American theater. I like this adaptation quite a lot, even if characters using words like “aforementioned” and “kicker” in the same speech imply a total disregard for the era of the novel; Gunderson does not give a darn about any of that. She rarely does.
That said, director Georgette Verdin’s production takes a good while to settle into anything approaching a truthful environment. This is a staging where it feels like each actor feels pressure to sell their character and many of the initial lines are rushed and shouted. It’s as if everyone is worrying too much about audience members getting bored, which is always unlikely, frankly, at any Gunderson play.
Part of the issue here is that Gunderson has split the narrative voice every which way but Sunday, which is fine, but this production carries on the feeling behind the line of dialog into the narration that follows. So you get actors first saying the line with high emotion and then repeating same in the narrative voice. That’s a lot and it all needs a lot more subtlety in the early going, at least. There is also a surfeit of fancy, hyped-up physical activity that feels like it came from the rehearsal room, or the movement classroom, and, while entertaining, it tends to suggest we’re watching hyperactive teens more than sentient, thoughtful, brilliantly artistic sisters. More listening and breathing would enhance the experience. Only Demetra Dee’s deftly understated Beth seems fully immersed in Alcott’s actual world; she could use more company.
But after a while, all of that becomes less invasive and the show finds a firmer footing. Many scholars and critics have started to view Jo as a potential gay icon (Gerwig’s film explored that theme, too) and that is very much where we go here. Jo (Tyler Meredith) certainly has fun with her admirer Laurie (he’s played by John Drea and those scenes are great), but she has less-than-zero chemistry with her German professor (Erik Hellman), I suspect by directorial design. No fault of Hellman’s but he comes off merely as a placeholder for her; Jo is conceived here as a kind of wandering, sexually unlocked being, awaiting an era when she might truly find herself.
Meredith is a skilled actor and it’s an interesting, if somewhat invulnerable, take that’s suited to the contemporary era. Whether or not she creates the gentler Jo most fans of the book see in their heads, there’s no question that she invests this character with writerly power and switches deftly between Louisa and her fictional alter-ego. (Gunderson has edged in there, too.)
Janyce Caraballo’s Meg, Yourtana Sulaiman’s Amy and Lucy Carapetyan’s Marmee all are most enjoyable although this show could just as well be called “Little Woman” as “Little Women.” We all quickly figure out with whom the hearts of the creators lies. Fair enough.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
Review: “Little Women” (3 stars)
When: Through Jan. 5
Where: Northlight Theatre at the North Shore Center for the Arts, 9501 Skokie Blvd., Skokie
Running time: 2 hours, 25 minutes
Tickets: $49-$91 at northlighttheatre.org
