‘Press’
The Wharton Salon: Bringing Edith
Wharton’s Works to Life at The Mount
Longtime Berkshire theater goers fondly reminisce about the days in the late 1970s when Tina Packer and her merry band of thespians took up residence at The Mount, where, in addition to Shakespeare, they performed theatrical adaptations of the work of the estate’s esteemed creator, Edith Wharton. That era ended in 2001, when Shakespeare & Company relocated to its current home, just down the road.
This week for the third summer, Wharton returns to her home, with a production of Autres Temps…, thanks toThe Wharton Salon, brainchild of former Shakespeare & Co. member Catherine Taylor-Williams, right. Like her two previous productions – Xingu andSummer, Autres Temps… was adapted by Dennis Krausnick, who was also responsible for Taylor-Williams’ introduction to Shakespeare & Co. in 1996.
“While I was in Toronto I met Dennis, who came up to do a workshop,” recounts Taylor-Williams, who is Canadian. “I found his approach to Shakespeare very refreshing and personal. After that workshop I was pretty determined to come down and work with Shakespeare & Co. I came to the Berkshires just as they were about to leave The Mount in the summer of 2001, but before the move I house-managed their fantasticMidsummer Night’s Dream.”
That summer she also house-managed The Wharton One Acts at Spring Lawn, the mansion adjacent to Shakespeare & Co.’s current campus, where the troupe staged intimate productions before the Bernstein Theatre was built. Among the program of one acts, she says, “Normi Noël directed An International Episode. I was very moved by the production, loved the wonderful roles for women, and also thought that performing in a non-traditional theatre space with windows, daylight, and in such close proximity to the audience was so much better than a black box theatre.”
“From there I began to read Wharton’s short stories,” she recounts. Her first onstage role with Shakespeare & Co., in 2002, was in Wharton’s first novel, The Valley of Decision. “I loved Dennis Krausnick’s adaptations; they were so dry, witty, and wonderful. And I also saw how much the audiences loved them, and I remembered that.”
In 2007 Taylor-Williams was accepted into a prestigious arts management program at the Kennedy Center. “I had been working in the press department at Shakespeare & Co. in addition to being onstage for five years,” she says. “I knew I wanted to run a theatre company, but there was a lot I needed to learn about fundraising, marketing, finance, and planning for a successful company, so I took a year to immerse myself in that alone and build a solid management base.
“From Washington, I went to New York thinking that was where I should strive to make my mark. I worked for two years at the Atlantic Theater Company in development, and was a member of the 2009-2010 Producer’s Lab at The Women’s Project, a company that advances plays written and directed by women. But I wasn’t prepared for how much I would miss the Berkshires.”
In 2008 she began thinking about bringing the works of Wharton back to the author’s home. She found a receptive ear in Susan Wissler, who had recently been named The Mount’s executive director. Taylor-Williams launched The Wharton Salon in 2009 with Xingu, she says, “…because it was one of Wharton’s very rare comedies and it had seven women’s roles for all my favorite actresses.” Next up was Summerbecause, she says, “It was a Berkshire story—about coming of age in time with nature and the seasons, which is a big part of our lives here.”
This year’s production is based on a short story by Wharton first published 100 years ago in Century Magazine as Other Times, Other Manners—a title derived from the French expressionautres temps, autres moeurs, later retitledAutres Temps… in Wharton’s 1916 collection Xingu. It tells the story of the scandalous Mrs. Lidcote, a divorcee who returns to New York from self-imposed exile in Europe, under the assumption that her daughter Leila, who is getting divorced and quickly remarried, is in need of support. Back in America, she finds that times certainly have changed… to some extent.
Taylor-Williams and Krausnick updated the setting to 1962, which, she says, required very few edits: “‘Sargent’s been to paint her’ changed to ‘Avedon’s been to photograph her for Harper’s Bazaar,’ etc. Really just cosmetics.” She also cast a real-life mother-and-daughter – Diane Prusha and Rory Hammond, both Wharton Salon veterans – in the mother-and-daughter roles. Corinna May, who plays cousin Suzy Suffern, was also in Xingu. (Prusha, May, and Hammond, l-r, in photo above by David Dashiell.)
With so many juicy roles for women, it’s only natural to wonder if Taylor-Williams is tempted to jump back over to the acting side of the stage, but, she says, “I am pleased and a little relieved to say I don’t think of that at all when I’m directing. Directing is very new to me, and there is a lot to learn, so I don’t have a lot of time to spend wishing I were onstage.
“Directing brings a very different type of joy. When the actors play a scene with precision, or something sad, funny or surprising happens, or when the designers create something extraordinary, or when the crew comes in and works all night putting up or taking down the set, it’s extremely humbling to be the one person out there witnessing all that passion and energy. But do I have Wharton roles I’d love to play? Ha ha. Sure.”
The Wharton Salon presents Autres Temps…
In the Stables at The Mount
2 Plunkett Street, Lenox, MA
August 17 – 28
Performance schedule:
Wednesdays and Thursdays, August 17, 18, 24 & 25 @ 5:30 p.m.
Saturdays, August 20 & 27 @ 10:30 a.m. & 3 p.m.
Sundays, August 21 & 28 @ 10:30 a.m.
Posted by Bess Hochstein on 08/17/11 at 10:21 AM •
BOSTON GLOBE, STAGES
Updated to changing times of 1962, ‘Autres Temps …’ at The Mount
August 19, 2011|By Joel Brown, Globe Correspondent
Rory Hammond, Diane Prushas real-life daughter, portrays Mrs. Lidcotes… (kevin sprague)
AUTRES TEMPS … Adapted from Edith Wharton by Dennis Krausnick
Directed by: Catherine Taylor-Williams. Presented by: The Wharton Salon
At: The Stables Auditorium, the Mount, 2 Plunkett St., Lenox. Through Aug. 28. Tickets: $35 general admission. 800-838-3006, www.whartonsalon.org
At first, “Mad Men’’ and Edith Wharton seem not to belong in the same sentence. But if you think of them both as chronicling the lives of people at a particular moment in society, constrained by the mores and manners of their time, the linkage makes a little more sense.
This month at The Mount, Wharton’s home in Lenox, the Wharton Salon presents a stage version of her story “Autres Temps …’’ relocated to TV’s “Mad Men’’ era, specifically 1962. Turns out it’s not much of a stretch
“Autres Temps …’’ tells the story of Mrs. Lidcote, who has been living in Europe since her scandalous divorce made her a pariah in high-society circles. But now her daughter Leila is going through a hasty divorce and remarriage herself, so Mrs. Lidcote returns home to help. Allegedly times have changed since her own troubles – but have they, really?
“Her experience was very disorienting, and … that seemed to be the experience of women at that time in general,’’ says the Salon’s producing artistic director, Catherine Taylor-Williams, who also directs the show.
“Autres Temps …’’ was first published in a magazine in 1911 as “Other Times, Other Manners,’’ and appeared under the current title in a story collection a few years later, Taylor-Williams says. She wanted to set the play halfway between 1911 and today. But wouldn’t that mean it should be set in 1961?
“I chose 1962 because I wanted to do just the year before some of the big changes that happened for America,’’ she says, listing President Kennedy’s assassination, and publication of “The Feminine Mystique.’’ “It’s like change is just on the cusp, but not yet. Obviously some wonderful changes and some unfortunate changes, but certainly ones that changed the landscape of America. I wanted to get that moment just before.’’
Although she’s aware that the era has been reexamined due to the popularity of “Mad Men,’’ Taylor-Williams says what really influenced her plan was two books she had been reading: “When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women From 1960 to the Present’’ by Gail Collins and “A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s’’ by Stephanie Coontz. Mrs. Lidcote had a lot of similarities to women in the early 1960s, Taylor-Williams says.
“Being told they should stay at home and be mothers and housewives, there was a whole cult of femininity they were expected to observe,’’ Taylor-Williams says. “But there was sort of an inner desire to break out, and no way to do that. And Mrs. Lidcote is trapped [too].’’
The adaptation by Shakespeare & Company’s Dennis Krausnick dates more than 20 years and has been somewhat revised for a smaller cast, Taylor-Williams says, but very few changes were required to move it forward a half-century in time.
“I’m not pointing a big red arrow at that. I’m just setting it there and saying, ‘See, Mrs. Wharton knew what was happening long before it was happening,’ which is what I’ve always suspected,’’ Taylor-Williams says. Wharton lived from 1862-1937.
They did change a reference to a portrait sitting for John Singer Sargent to one for photographer Richard Avedon, she says.
The Mount was home to Shakespeare & Company for more than 20 years, before an acrimonious split a decade ago. Longtime members tend to remember the years at The Mount as an idyll. The Salon was founded in 2009 to bring theatrical versions of Wharton’s work back to the site, but has also provided a bit of a rapprochement between the two organizations. The group produced “Xingu’’ at The Mount in 2009 and “Summer’’ in 2010.
Prusha was in those productions, too. And she grew up as an actress with Shakespeare & Company at The Mount, she says by cellphone just before a rehearsal. “So coming back and doing these is like coming home for me. Right now I’m sitting under a tree, by the stables at The Mount, and it’s like home.’’
And there’s even more resonance in the casting: Mrs. Lidcote’s daughter, Leila, is played by Prusha’s daughter Rory Hammond, who has also been in all three Wharton Salon shows and who made her stage debut at The Mount as a small child in Shakespeare & Company days.
“It’s wonderful,’’ says Prusha. “She grew up here at The Mount, so it’s really fun to come and do this, to work with her as an actor and watch her grow up and become an artist in her own right.’’
“How much further had we come?’’ says Diane Prusha, the longtime Shakespeare & Co. actor who plays Mrs. Lidcote. “Other than what the costume is, the look of it, I don’t find it that much different, I don’t find the sensibilities of the people that much different.’’
Out of Time
by James Yeara on August 24, 2011 · 0 comments
The leisure-class clash in Autres Temps, the Wharton Salon’s third annual production at the Mount, has been given an effectively timely update. First published in Century magazine exactly 100 years ago this August, Edith Wharton’s short story “Other Times, Other Manners” has been set by Wharton Salon director Catherine Taylor-Williams in 1962, at the cusp of that pivitol Mad Men era. Adapted for stage by Shakespeare & Company stalwart Dennis Krausnick, this 62-minute one-act fills the intimate Stables Auditorium on the grounds of the Mount, much as Shakespeare & Company’s Wharton Series did in the Mount’s salon overlooking the terrace shrubbery two decades ago.
Autres Temps focuses on shunned divorcee Mrs. Lidcote (the perfectly cast Diane Prusha) who returns hurriedly to New York society and their summer Berkshire playland after a two-decade European exile to be with her daughter, Leila (an icy Rory Hammond), in her hour of need after her own divorce. Only society doesn’t shun divorcees any longer, Mrs. Lidcote discovers, and Leila’s hour of need hinges not on her own divorce and remarriage, but on her mother’s.
Taylor-Williams keeps her five-actor cast focused and subtle with Pinteresque poise and pace, andAutres Temps’ settings shift with an economy of effort and stagecraft that serves Taylor-Williams well. From the deck of the ocean liner Queen Mary (created by two white wooden folding chairs and David Noel Edwards’ smart sound design), Mrs. Lidcote sips champagne with “wants-to-be-more-than-just-good-friend” Franklin Ide (a smooth James Goodwin Rice, co-founder of Albany’s own Capital Repertory Theatre and, like the others in the cast, a Shakespeare & Company alumnus). Ide tries to convince her that “Lenox is far enough from New York that the ritual (shunning) may not be known there,” which drew knowing chuckles from the audience.
The second scene slips to the smallish, second-floor sitting room in the Berkshire estate of Leila and her new husband Wilbur, where Mrs. Lidcote arranges red roses in a crystal vase, marveling that “everything’s changed . . . there’s no ‘Old New York’ left . . . every woman has the right to happiness,” while waiting for her daughter to greet her. In the third scene, marked by a new arrangment of white lilies, family confidant and serial status updater Susy Suffern (the peerless Corinna May) breathlessly tells the waiting Mrs. Lidcote “You won’t know Leila. She’s had her pearls reset.” By the time Leila and her pearls make their own appearance with the brash greeting, “You queer wild mother. I know how you hate people,” in the fourth scene, the shadows of doubt across Mrs. Lidcote’s face are as long as those cast by the late afternoon sun through the French doors. “Leila will never forgive herself if you make an effort you’re not up to,” Susy sighs as she and Leila come and go into the sitting room in an effort to keep Mrs. Lidcote out of sight while an important dinner party occurs on the main floor below.
With Franklin Ide’s return in the fifth and final scene, Mrs. Lidcote’s dilemma has played out: “The older people have half forgotten why, and the younger ones have never really known; it’s simply become a tradition to cut me. And traditions that have lost their meaning are the hardest of all to destroy,” she says to him as she prepares her steamer trunks for departure the following day. When he slips silently from the room while her back is turned, rather than go out and make a social visit with her, Mrs. Lidcote sits and stares into the future as a single harsh white light washes all color from her face at the play’s end.
Past adaptations of Wharton’s stories usually seemed little more than dusty costumed museum pieces, “tea cuplets” with a pretentious sensibility. But Taylor-Williams’ 1962 update lends Autres Temps a timelier confine, illuminating characters and theme more than 1911 passementeries, opera gloves, and lorgnettes would. This is a case where the director’s concept brings into sharper focus the play’s theme rather than obscures it.
 |
 |
 |
|
||
 |
Staging Edith Wharton’s ‘Autres Temps’ in her Berkshires HomeBy Simi Horwitz
AUGUST 11, 2011
Rehearsing Edith Wharton’s “Autres Temps” in her 19th-century Massachusetts drawing room takes site-specific theater to a whole new level. The room offers ornate ceilings, a marble fireplace, and murals depicting scenes from Greek mythology, and beyond the floor-to-ceiling glass doors, a terrace overlooks formal Italianate gardens, Laurel Lake, and the rolling hills of the Berkshires. Wharton’s mansion, the Mount, designed to celebrate symmetry, order, and scale, serves as a perfect backdrop for a story written 100 years ago about the stigma of divorce in a seemingly harmonious society that’s just beginning to feel the rumblings of change—though in this version, directed by Catherine Taylor-Williams, the scene has been updated to 1962.”I have always said Mrs. Wharton was ahead of her time,” says Taylor-Williams, producing artistic director of the Wharton Salon, now launching its third season. “When I was preparing to do the play, I was also reading two books: ‘When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women From 1960 to the Present’ by Gail Collins and ‘A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s’ by Stephanie Coontz. There seemed to be something similar between Mrs. Lidcote in Wharton’s 1911 story and the women I was reading about in the other two books about the early 1960s. My audience was alive in 1962, obviously not in 1911. So I decided it would open an interesting dialogue by setting the play in 1962, on the cusp of great change for Americans, and American women in particular. And I thought it would stretch us all: the actors, the designers, the audience, and myself as a director.”
The Wharton Salon is Taylor-Williams’ baby and in many ways represents a homecoming. A former actor with the Lenox, Mass.–based Shakespeare & Company, she left the troupe in 2007 to take a graduate fellowship in arts management at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., followed by a stint in the development department at the Atlantic Theater Company in New York. She felt the time had come to move on, cultivate new skills that would boost her income, and give herself the means necessary to forge a theater company should she decide to do so. As Taylor-Williams tells it, she was haunted by the actors she had performed with at Shakespeare & Company, its bucolic surroundings, and the Mount, where Shakespeare & Company resided for more than 20 years before being forced out in the wake of a convoluted controversy and much ill will on all sides. But the Wharton Salon is a totally separate entity, and the board of directors has largely changed. The formerly decaying and dilapidated house has been restored, and the administrators are more than open to producing Wharton’s stories in the house or in the stable on the premises. “We are delighted to be partnering with the Wharton Salon again this year, as their performances add another very important way for people to experience the power of Wharton’s writings,” says Susan Wissler, the Mount’s executive director. ” ‘Autres Temps’ is arguably one of Wharton’s finest pieces.” For Taylor-Williams, staging Wharton represents the perfect marriage between wonderfully complex and nuanced roles for women of “a certain age” and the gifted, mature actors she has recruited for “Autres Temps” and her two previous productions, “Summer” and “Xingu.” Her current cast includes mother and daughter Diane Prusha and Rory Hammond (playing a mother and daughter), Corinna May, and James Goodwin Rice. All are, or have been, affiliated with Shakespeare & Company and have performed in a roster of Wharton dramatizations written by Shakespeare & Company founder Dennis Krausnick. “Autres Temps” is also adapted by Krausnick. To date, the Wharton Salon has enjoyed sold-out runs with enthusiastic audiences who are eager to discuss the plays they’ve seen, other stories they’ve read and recommend, and their personal connection to Wharton’s work, Taylor-Williams reports. Much of Wharton’s writing explores the lives of conflicted upper-class women who are torn between society’s restraints and their own convention-defying impulses. Wharton’s best-known novels are “The House of Mirth,” “The Age of Innocence,” and “Ethan Frome.” Acting Wharton The actors are excited by Wharton as well. May, who has more than a dozen Wharton dramatizations to her credit, is continually drawn to the author’s depth and “a kind of mysterious inner life that she did not express,” says the actor. “All of her heroines are complicated and full of paradox. There is nothing straightforward about any of them. There is so much subtext. That makes for the best drama.” Prusha, a 20-year Wharton actor, also talks about “the unspoken beneath the surface.” As an actor, the pleasure and challenge are the layer upon layer of emotion that need to be subtly hinted at, she says. Rice notes that a male actor faces the same daunting tasks in tackling Wharton’s men. “A larger challenge is the little aspects of language and syntax that reflect the time in which it was written,” he adds. “It’s wordy to a contemporary ear, though Dennis has simplified the language. But I enjoy solving the problem of the language and interpreting it. Why one word as opposed to another? Acting is sleuthing.” As real-life mother and daughter, Prusha and Hammond bring an added dimension to the performance. They’ve performed together in the past and share a good personal and creative relationship. “Working with my mom is fun, though we’ve had artistic differences,” Hammond says, laughing. “Neither of us can get away with anything if it’s false. We know each other very well and are honest with each other. We can’t phone in a performance.” Still, the material’s archaic view of ostracized divorced women would seem problematic for modern actors, despite Taylor-Williams’ ’60s updating. “I’m fascinated by setting it in ’62,” says Rice. “I was a junior in high school and very much aware of social norms and the double standard for men and women, girls and boys. Divorce was still viewed as shocking, and kids whose parents were divorced were seen as different.” May insists that the attitudes in the story are not removed from her experience either. As a young woman, she watched her mother’s misery as a divorcée. “I can put myself in 1911 or 1962 because of my mother,” she says. “Divorce is a huge deal, even though the culture pretends it’s not. We know it’s very damaging to children, and there’s still the issue of who gets invited out with friends after a divorce. Edith Wharton’s culture is in many ways like contemporary Hollywood. When you’re married to the right person, you’re in. When you’re not married to that person, you’re out. The two worlds share a great deal in terms of status and hierarchy. Exclusion and banishment from the group exists.” Informed by the Space No one has any doubt that the extraordinary space, overflowing with the author’s presence, informs the acting. “I feel like I’m in that world, literally,” says Rice. “This is the kind of country home these characters would visit or occupy. This is a little bit like acting in a film’s locale. The site-specific surroundings inform the content and make the connection that much easier.” May points out that humans, like animals, instinctively and biologically respond to their environments. The relationship with one’s space is intuitive. “In a theater, a set designer creates part of the world and the actor has to create the rest,” she notes. “But if you’re in the actual room, talking about looking out at Laurel Lake and actually looking out at Laurel Lake, the room then becomes the greatest scene partner. When we’re performing in the stable, the relationship is a little different. We have to work a little harder, but it’s still Edith’s place.” The authenticity of the scene also makes the suspension of disbelief that much easier for the audience, the actors say.
May lived at the Mount in the fall of 1989 while completing a work-study program with Shakespeare & Company. Prusha and Hammond say their connection to the house is far more personal. When the house was owned and run by Shakespeare & Company, Prusha and her then-husband, Michael Hammond, lived on the premises as members of the theater commune for 10 years. “I came here when I was 23,” she says. “This is part of my growing-up process. My daughter was conceived here. I feel I’m almost channeling Edith: to work in her place, a place where she was really happy. The Mount was her pride and joy. She created it and wrote amazing things here. To keep her words alive in this place gives it such resonance, especially for me as a woman.” “It was my home; it was Edith Wharton’s home,” adds Hammond. “Working in this environment must inform the acting on levels that I’m not even aware of.” New Roles, New Plans Taylor-Williams’ dream production is a dramatization of the novel “The Custom of the Country,” the adventures of a savagely ambitious and much married social climber, Undine Spragg. “I can’t think of another female character in literature like Undine Spragg,” says Taylor-Williams. “What ambition! What a fun role for an actress! And what a challenge for a producer and director! To do it, we would be increasing cast size from our current maximum of seven or eight actors to more like 10 or maybe even 15. I can’t begin to imagine how many costumes and set locations we’d need, since the story takes place on two continents. It would probably run about three hours with edits and require at least six weeks of rehearsals to cover the material. I also think a character like Undine, whose story spans from her 20s into her late 40s or early 50s, would be better played by more than one actress. Ideally, we would do it in three parts and run each part during the week and the cycle on the weekend. It’s a Herculean task. It would be enormous fun, though, and I know the audience would love it.” Taylor-Williams also talks about branching out to include dramatizations of stories written by Wharton’s contemporaries or playwrights from that time: “Edith Wharton was a New Yorker. How lovely it would be to find a location in New York City to adapt a New York story. There’s a lot of exciting things to work towards.” “Autres Temps” will be performed Aug. 17–28 (at various times) at the Mount. Tickets: www.whartonsalon.org, www.edithwharton.org, or (800) 838-3006. |
|
Edith Wharton returns to the stage at the Mount next week, and the production is a homecoming of sorts for the actors and director, too.
A new theater group called the Wharton Salon is bringing an adaptation of Wharton’s story “Xingu’’ to the writer’s landmark home in Lenox. The one-act comedy will be performed Aug. 20-23 in Wharton’s drawing room, “which is appropriate, since it actually takes place in a drawing room,’’ says Susan Wissler, executive director of the Mount.
The play centers around a society women’s lunch club hosting a popular author for a discussion of her latest novel. When conversation teeters toward social disaster, the club’s most unpredictable member introduces a compelling new topic, Xingu, although no one quite knows what that is.
Behind the scenes, the production offers a happy return for director/producer Catherine Taylor-Williams and most of the actors, who are current or former members of Shakespeare & Company. The Mount was home to Shakespeare & Company for more than 20 years, before an acrimonious split that became final in 2001. Read More…