“The only good thing in the story is the girl,” felt Henry James about his 1880 novel, Washington Square. He disliked the book, calling it “an unhappy accident.”
“The girl” is Catherine Sloper–a young woman, actually–the only child of the wealthy Austin Sloper. Her troubled character is the center of Washington Square, named for the New York City neighborhood where the Slopers live in the 1850s.
The “girl” portrayed by Erika Cuenca in PICT Classical Theatre’s latest production, The Heiress, adapted from James’ novel, is the best of several good things in this conventionally staged conventional play.
Ms. Cuenca captures the desperation of a woman convinced by her unfeeling father that she’s worthless. In an era when a woman’s roles were to be only a wife and mother, Catherine’s prospects are few. She is painfully shy and unattractive. Her only “worth” comes from the money left her by her mother, who died giving birth to Catherine, and her father’s fortune when he dies.
James is the master of the internal. He focuses on how the mind and the heart are constantly at war with each other. What happens in his stories isn’t as important as why his characters acted the way they did.
Catherine knows she’s a fine person but feels unloved. Ms. Cuenca displays this conflict subtly and without self-pity. Her rare smiles illuminate the dully lit stage like a warm flash in a cold night.
Enter the gold-digger Morris Townsend played by a slippery Alex Silberblatt. He’s broke and without prospects, but knows how to romance a woman in need of praise and what might be love. She falls for him in an instant.
Her cynical father spots a con-man just as fast. PICT veteran James FitzGerald plays Austin as a gruff, self-absorbed man whose own heartbreak leaves little room for his unhappy child.
Sloper calls his daughter “defenseless” and threatens to cut her out of his will if she marries Morris. Catherine doesn’t care, but Morris does. Maybe there are better prospects in California.
Written by Ruth and Augustus Goetz, The Heiress first opened on Broadway in 1947 with the legendary Basil Rathbone as Austin, but it met with little success. At a time when American drama was energized by playwrights Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, The Heiress seems a relic of an earlier time on Broadway.
Director Alan Stanford’s version of The Heiress keeps it a period piece. The first act moves so slowly it seems he is posing his actors for a 1850s daguerreotype. At first, the odd set of the Slopers’ drawing room appears bland and uninteresting. Large empty picture frames hang over a sparsely decorated space without color.
Gradually we realize the statement of scenic designer Domenico LaGamba: the set represents Catherine’s empty life. The only color comes from her bright red dress in the opening scenes. Costume designer Joan Markert has created a series of dresses and bonnets smartly reflecting the period.
The Heiress comes to life in the second act when Catherine and her father argue over her attachment to Morris. Ms. Cuenca and FitzGerald create an emotionally devastating moment when Catherine confronts her father’s life-long rejection of her.
The change in her character is powerful and full of desolation. You can almost see Ms. Cuenca’s body shift in a new direction when she accepts her plight. If unloved, then she has becoming unloving herself. The moment lifts the play from the ordinary to the exceptional.
PICT regular Karen Baum as the meddling aunt Lavinia heads the solid supporting cast of Samantha Camp, Gayle Pazerski, Cary Anne Spear, Max Pavel and Anne Rematt.
The Heiress is a languid 2 ½-hours, quickening in the final 15 minutes when its climatic scene plays out.
The Heiress runs through April 27 at the WQED Fred Roger’s Studio. Tickets $15-$48. For more information, visit their site.
Bob Hoover retired from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette as its full-time book editor and drama editor in 2011 after 28 years with the newspaper. He continued to write part-time for the PG reviewing books, theater, and articles on literary, historical and local topics until 2014. Hoover has reviewed myriad entertainment productions from the circus to children’s theater in Pittsburgh, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Canada. As a book editor, he reviewed an average of 50 books a year, wrote regular columns on the local and national literary scene and organized and edited the newspaper’s weekly book section. He provided extensive coverage of Pittsburgh’s literary community as well as reporting on events, readings, and festivals around the country. Hoover was a theater journalism fellow at the Annenberg School of Journalism at the University of Southern California and the winner of state and local writing awards.
Categories: Archived Reviews