Playwright: Polly Teale
At: Remy Bumppo Theatre Company
at the Victory Gardens Greenhouse, 2257 N. Lincoln
Phone: 773-871-3000; $35-$40
Runs through: May 4
They weren't Chekhov's three sisters, but he might have had them in mind when he wrote his examination of feminine unfulfillment. Indeed, the remarkable real-life saga of Emily, Charlotte and Anne Brontë is echoed by more than one writer in the nearly two centuries since these extraordinary siblings achieved international literary acclaim despite living in isolation--geographically, chronologically and socially.
Playwright Polly Teale's exhaustive research cannot be faulted, nor her prodigious admiration for her subjects--a circle encompassing, in addition to the intellectually gifted daughters of a self-educated Yorkshire clergyman of Rousseauian inclination, his unfortunate son, doomed to collapse under the pressure of an ill-assigned freedom enjoining him to pursue the goals of his whole spiritually-starved clan. But while the likelihood of anyone attending this Remy Bumppo Theatre production without a superficial cognizance of the Brontë canon is probably slight, Teale's abundance of detail packed into the abbreviated constraints of modern drama makes for several motifs better suited to the leisurely pace of a book, or to the swift transitions of a screenplay.
Even playgoers aware of the models for the spinster sibs' male protagonists might be startled at an enfeebled Brontë paterfamilias suddenly springing to his feet as the passionate Rochester, for example. And the cinematic conceit of a spectral lady-in-white lurking on the fringes of the action, where she writhes and keens in virginal frustration, is reduced to ludicrousness in live performance on Remy Bumppo's intimate stage. ( Eventually, we come to connect her utterances to those of the heroines in the novels, but as one audience member mused at intermission, 'What if you haven't read the stories?' )
All that said, theatergoers capable of navigating the multiple dimensions of Teale's narrative--did I mention that the trio of actresses portraying the Misses Brontë step in and out of character in the course of the play?--will be amply rewarded by fascinating insights into the lives and times of English literature's most reclusive geniuses, delineated in smart, meticulously-crafted performances by actors carefully coached by consultant Eva Breneman in the drawling Yorkshire dialect. And if Teale's parenthetical discussions of--say, the economic repercussions of mechanization in the region's textile industries--make you wish you'd brought your Cliff's Notes, the playbill provides a helpful summary guide to this ambitious biodrama.