LITTLE WOMEN, BIG PERFORMANCES
I had forgotten how great Little Women is.
Lucky for me, its performance—adapted by Kate Hamill and acted by Mammoth Lakes Repertory Theater and Mammoth Lakes High School—Wednesday Night (opening night) was the reminder that I needed.
The story upon which the play is based, written by Louisa May Alcott, is about as timeless as it gets. It is, ultimately, a love letter to sisterhood. Which is, to say, growing up in the company of women who teach you that love and hate can exist all at once.
My mom read it to me and my sisters when we were younger. (Well, she read most of it. Little Women’s source material is 759 pages, and she did us a favor by leaving out the dull bits and the descriptors of Civil War Era Massachusetts hillscapes.) Still, we got the gist, and as all little girl readers do, we tied ourselves to one of Alcott’s characters. My oldest sister was the steadfast Meg. My bookish sister was Jo. I (unfortunately and accurately) was Amy. None of us were sweet enough to identify with Beth.
(In Hamill’s adaptation, Beth is often referred to as “The Conscience” so what the hell does that say about us?)
We were also fortunate to live in Massachusetts. We went to Louisa May Alcott’s home and birthplace of the story in Concord—Orchard House—more than once. What I remember from those trips is a tour guide telling us that Alcott wrote so diligently and so often that she gave herself carpal tunnel syndrome. It was so bad that the author trained herself to be ambidextrous so that she could switch to the other hand when the first got tired.
What a beautiful notion that is—to be so compelled to write a tribute to your sisters, that you freeze the muscles in your hand half to death. And then you keep writing.
And kudos to the director, Juliana Olinka Jones, for choosing this story for the stage. The themes of the show are current, but their articulation is not.
By that I mean that many contemporary female characters are written as assured. Independent. Unapologetically indecorous. They seem to be compensating for centuries of their sex being written wholly as the opposite. But in doing so, they have drifted to the other extreme.
The little women in Alcott’s story are all of those things, aforementioned—heroine Jo March, in particular. But Jo also struggles with growing into herself. She is occasionally embarrassed by her ambitions. She is unsure of her course, and those of her sisters, to the point that her faith in herself nearly collapses in the play’s third act. She excuses it as a long overdue bout of realism, until her sister, Beth, slaps some sense into her.
“That’s not growing up,” Beth (played by Jovie Plum) says, when Jo (Ana Swisher) announces that she’s giving up her dream of being a writer for a provincial and convenient life. “That’s giving up.”
Because what are sisters for, if not to teach us how to be in the world.
And to that end, I forgot how wonderful high school theater is. No surprise when Jones and Shira Dubrovner are at the helm. But the leads rose to the occasion of that which their characters demanded.
Plum played Beth March beautifully. As Beth is the linchpin of her sisters’ relationship with each other, Plum was the linchpin to the performance’s most delicate moments.
Emma Chavez as Meg was a natural scene partner to each actor with which she shared dialogue. Controlled, graceful, and a comic when you least expect her to be, I can only assume Chavez is an older sister herself.
Whitney Orozco as Amy. Funny, fiery. Quite a commendable feat to see an actress of her age convey the maturation of Amy with such refinement.
Swisher was a natural Jo March. Every line was delivered with conviction and power. She’s a leading lady, no doubt.
And Stella D. Vanderhurst as Laurie was charming as ever. Timothée Chalamet and Christian Bale should be watching their white woolen shirt backs—Vanderhurst has got the stuff.
Beck Libling (Brooks), Maddie McCabe (Marmee), Tori Newman (Aunt March), and Violet Spezzia (Hannah) anchored their scenes with poise, giving warmth to the March hearth, home, and set pieces.
Performances from the Mammoth Lakes Repertory Theater actors—Jeff Frome as Mr. Laurence, Madeline Roy as Mrs. Mingott, and Clay Tyson as both Mr. March and Mr. Dashwood—were extraordinary stage presences, and added dimensionality to the performances of their younger castmates’ performances. To chalk the collaboration of these two generations of actors up to a cute foray of small-town community theater would be a disservice to the production. It was just good acting.
What can I say, I laughed. I cried. Those kids can command a stage.
But to paraphrase Jones, who appeared with director’s notes before the curtain went up:
“None of these characters are good, or bad. These ‘little women’ are imperfect. Their family is not perfect. But this production sure is.”
To see it for yourself, this weekend only, tickets can be purchased only at the door of Mammoth High School’s theater. The show runs May 15-19, with 7 pm performances Wednesday-Saturday, and a 4 pm matinee on Sunday.
