Playwright: adapted by Christina Calvit from the novel by E.M. Forster
At: Lifeline Theatre, 6912 N. Glenwood Ave.
Phone: 773-761-4477; $24-$26
Runs through: Dec. 3
BY MARY SHEN BARNIDGE
Our heroine is a young woman who doesn't know what to think—or, more accurately, how to think. She has two suitors: a bookish snob who loves her for that very vacuity and a Byronesque chevalier who acts according to his instincts and whose sorrow is that the object of his adoration does not do the same ( even after playing Beethoven on the piano ) . Since this is 1908, and the ambivalent Miss Lucy Honeychurch of Tunbridge Wells has become acquainted with the latter while away from home—in Italy, no less—their return to provincial English society soon has her exhorting herself not to think, lest she disturb its cozy status quo.
This wistfully romantic story would seem to be exactly the material upon which Christina Calvit and Dorothy Milne have forged their reputation as two of Lifeline Theatre's foremost page-to-stage adapters. To be sure, they are handicapped by E. M. Forster's assumption that his readers occupy the same circumscribed social circles as his characters, making for nuances often lost to modern sensibilities. They are also disabled by the uneasy undercurrent of the closeted author's own homophile longings, and the protracted narrative progress engendered thereby.
Salvit and Milne's expertise serves them well in their rescue of Forster's sluggish prose, however. Assisted by J. Branson's fluid scenic design ( with locales encompassing a Florentine boarding-house, a stormy carriage-ride through the countryside on the road to Fiesole, and a skinny-dip in a woodland pond ) ; Victoria DeIorio's sensitively-selected incidental music; Elizabeth Powell Shaffer's enchanting costumes; and instruction in two languages by Phil Timberlake, Sarah Royston and the aforementioned DeIorio, a roster of energetic actors well-versed in the ambience of their genre's better-known representatives ( e.g., Henry James, Jane Austen, Georgette Heyer ) pour on the élan, rendering the action breezy and subtext immediate.
Even to literary scholars nowadays, Forster's aesthetic translates imperfectly. But if Live Bait Theatre's Blind Tasting in 2003 didn't spark you to book a vacation in Florence, this Lifeline production is certain to arouse wanderlust for views inspiring the awakenings that it celebrates.