Playwright: Oliver Goldsmith, adapted by William Brown
At: Northlight Theatre at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, 9501 N. Skokie, Skokie
Phone: 847-673-6300; $34-$54
Runs through: April 29
BY MARY SHEN BARNIDGE
She Stoops To Conquer, subtitled 'The Mistakes of a Night,' is a classic in dramatic literature, its place in classroom curricula between the Restoration and Romantic periods shared only by Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The Rivals.
Eighteenth-century distinctions between London aristocrats and country squires being nowadays mostly lost on Yankee audiences, transposing Oliver Goldsmith's comedy-of-manners from an English suburb in 1773 to a Montana cattle-ranch circa 1895 probably seemed like a good idea. And if the creative minds behind it hadn't given up too soon, their analogy might have emerged as more than just a clever concept.
Not that William Brown's adaptation doesn't take some short cuts: The two city slickers who come a-courting are still Londoners, and the landowner that one of them hopes to make his father-in-law is an Irish immigrant with an accent likewise hearkening to old-country idioms. That leaves the actors playing the allegedly American-born characters to either replace anachronistic language from the original text with expressions reflecting their production's universe, or to immerse themselves in their New World personalities and deliver their antiquated dialogue from that vantage.
The task of serving as both adapter and director appear to have spread Brown's attention too thin, however, resulting in a number of contradictory motifs. Mr. Hardcastle offers his guests refreshment from a moonshine jug, and a pair of barrels on a porch conceal eavesdroppers in the famous 'screen scene,' but buckskin-clad servants refer to their employers as 'your worship' and 'my mistress.' The spunky Miss Neville wears a riding skirt and leather vest, but still dons a shawl, gloves and muff for travel. Caught in a tug-of-war of two conflicting performance styles, some of the actors come off as denizens of the northwest frontier, others as little more than incongruously-garbed anglophile archetypes.
For all its flaws, there is, nevertheless, much to enjoy in this Northlight production. Andrew Hansen, Doug Frew and Patti McKenny contribute a score of hoot-n-holler ballads to bridge ( or, at times, interrupt ) the action, rendered with gusto by Alex Goodrich, Susan Felder and Matthew Brumlow. Rachel Anne Healy's costumes acquaint us with Goldsmith's personae as efficiently as whole pages of expository monologue. And a cast of seasoned players step through their paces as smartly as if their soufflé-light script hadn't been brought to the table before its cooking was complete.