Wharton in Words and Spirit at The Mount in The Inner House

Tod Randolph as Edith Wharton; photo by Kevin Sprague

“I have sometimes thought that a woman’s nature is like a great house full of rooms,” Edith Wharton wrote in her short story The Fullness of Life. She was speaking from experience. Having settled at The Mount in Lenox, Massachusetts—a rambling estate with ornate gardens, stables, a gatehouse, and a classical revival mansion overlooking Laurel Lake—Wharton knew from great houses. And as a successful female author navigating the conventions and prejudices of turn-of-the-century America, she knew plenty about the complex inner lives of women.

This month, thanks to The Wharton Salon, audiences can explore the many rooms of Wharton’s mind in a whole new way. The Inner House, a one-woman play adapted from Wharton’s autobiography and letters, runs at The Mount from August 15-26. The show reunites a dream team of veteran Whartonites, including producing artistic director and Wharton Salon founder Catherine Taylor-Williams, director Normi Noël , playwright Dennis Krausnick, and actress Tod Randolph, who plays Wharton herself.

“You have the mistress of the house, who you already know from visiting The Mount, talking about her life in a building that she designed,” says Taylor-Williams. That’s the kind of unique theater-going experience she had in mind when she founded the Wharton Salon four years ago. By performing Wharton’s works right on her old home, the company revives a tradition pioneered by Shakespeare & Company during its 23-year residence at The Mount.

This year’s production of The Inner House takes full advantage of the estate’s rich history. “The Mount is known for its hauntings, as many old buildings are,” says director Noël. And like many people of her time, Wharton was intrigued by spiritualism and the idea of communicating with the dead. Noël conceived of the play as an opportunity for Wharton’s spirit, wandering around the estate, to stumble upon the modern-day audience and decide to tell her story.

“Writers have to write to an imaginary audience,” says Noël. But in this play, “Edith finds the audience in her inner house and realizes as a writer that they were there all along.” The set-up reflects the deep bond many contemporary readers feel with Wharton: “We aren’t ghosts to her any more than she’s a ghost to us.”

The autobiographical nature of The Inner House makes it a fitting choice for the 150-year anniversary of Wharton’s birth. This year’s milestone has sparked renewed interest in the author’s life and works—not to mention a good dose of controversy. In February, novelist Jonathan Franzen made some unflattering remarks about Wharton’s looks (not pretty) and personality (snobbish) in The New Yorker, kicking off a debate that reverberated throughout the literary world. While everyone seems to have an opinion about Wharton these days, The Inner House lets her speak for herself.

“We’re taken on this tour by Wharton in her own words, rather than someone saying, ‘This is who we think Edith Wharton is or was,’” says Taylor-Williams. “By writing her own autobiography, we have to assume that this is what she wanted us to know about her.”

The Inner House will also play at the New York Society Library on December 2, where it will help conclude the institution’s yearlong Wharton celebration. Although her birthday festivities must draw to an end with 2012, the public appetite for all things Wharton seems unlikely to diminish.

Luckily, Noël says, Wharton’s inner life—that great house full of rooms—doesn’t have to be a mystery to modern audiences. “In the play, Dennis has her say, ‘Look idiot, if you just knew which room to look in and what door handle to turn, there you would find wonders and treasures.’” The Wharton Salon will keep unlocking those doors for years to come. — Sarah Todd

The Wharton Salon presents The Inner House at The Mount
August 15 – 26
2 Plunkett Street
Lenox, MA
Tickets: $35; to purchase, call 1.800.838.3006 or click here.

 THE WHARTON SALON CELEBRATES EDITH WHARTON’S 150^TH BIRTHDAY WITH

THE INNER HOUSE  (August 15-26, 2012)

[Lenox, MA] The Wharton Salon joins The Mount’s year-long celebration of Edith Wharton’s 150^th birthday by putting Edith Wharton herself onstage this year in The Inner House, August 15-26, 2012. Adapted by Dennis Krausnick from Wharton’s 1934 autobiography, A Backward Glance, actress Tod Randolph plays Edith Wharton in a vivid account of Wharton’s public and private life directed by veteran Wharton director, Normi Noël.

Tickets are $35 General Admission. Performances take place in The Stables Theatre at The Mount Wednesday to Friday at 5:30 pm and on weekends Saturday and Sunday at 3pm.  For tickets and information go to www.whartonsalon.org or call 1-800-838-3006.

In December, The Wharton Salon will bring The Inner House to New York City to The New York Society Library (NYSocLib) on E. 79^th St. and Madison Ave. as part of the NYSocLib’s Wharton birthday events, the only performing arts group to join a year-long series that has included celebrated biographer Hermione Lee and an photographic exhibition called “Wharton’s New York City: A Backward Glance.” (Date and time to be announced shortly).

“It’s fitting to celebrate Wharton’s birthday with an appearance from Wharton herself,” says Producing Artistic Director Catherine Taylor-Williams. “It will give patrons to The Mount a perfect context for visiting her home this summer, and I’m delighted to have Normi Noël on board to direct. We’re also very excited to join the Wharton birthday series at the New York Society Library in December and to perform in another beautiful building from Wharton’s time.”

The Inner House is taken from Edith Wharton’s 1934 autobiography A Backward Glance and several of her private letters and poems. It begins with Wharton at five years old taking a walk with her father down “the old Fifth Avenue” in New York City, her earliest years of “making up” which sowed the seeds of her later writing career, her early unpreparedness for marriage to Teddy Wharton, days at The Mount, unhappiness and divorce, her later affair with Morton Fullerton, her journey abroad, assistance to France in The Great War, and loving descriptions of her close friends, mentors, and companions Henry James, Walter Berry, and Bernard Berenson to name a few.

Edith Wharton (1862-1937) Author of The Age of Innocence, Ethan Frome, and The House of Mirth, wrote over 40 books in 40 years, including authoritative works on architecture, gardens, interior design, and travel. Essentially self-educated, Wharton was the first woman awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, an honorary Doctorate of Letters from Yale University and a full membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

The 150^th Anniversary of Edith Wharton’s birth has led to lively discussion by modern novelists about Wharton’s life and writing this year. Jonathan Franzen’s essay in The New Yorker (“A Rooting Interest: Edith Wharton and the Problem of Sympathy,” February 13, 2012) and the response from writer Victoria Patterson in The Los Angeles Review of Books (“Not Pretty,” Feb 25, 2012), followed by others in The Daily Beast, and Salon.com unleashed a firestorm of comments in the blogosphere about how women writers and their work are portrayed in the media.

The Wharton Salon is a professional theatre company that performs the stories of novelist Edith Wharton and her contemporaries in site-specific locations, offering a unique intimacy between author, actor, and audience; and drawing connections between literature, architecture, and nature. For tickets, cast bios, video, performance archives, and photos go to www.whartonsalon.org.

The Mount is a center for culture inspired by the passions and achievements of Edith Wharton. Designed and built by Wharton in 1902, the house embodies the principles outlined in her influential book, The Decoration of Houses (1897).  The property includes three acres of formal gardens designed by Wharton, who was also an authority on European landscape design, surrounded by extensive woodlands.  Programming at The Mount reflects Wharton’s core interests in the literary arts, interior design and decoration, garden and landscape design, and the art of living.  For more information go to www.edithwharton.org.

The New York Society Library was founded in 1754 and is the city’s oldest library. The beautiful landmarked building at 53 East 79^th St. dates from 1917 and includes reading rooms, spaces for study, stacks, and the Assunta, Ignazio, Ada and Romano Peluso Exhibition Gallery. The Library has approximately 300,000 volumes and hosts a variety of special events, seminars, and workshops. Information on the Library and its history can be found at www.nysoclib.org.

 At A Glance

Production: The Inner House

Adapted from Edith Wharton, by Dennis Krausnick

Theatre: The Stables Auditorium at The Mount, 2 Plunkett Street, Lenox, MA

Cast: Tod Randolph

Director: Normi Noël

Producer: Catherine Taylor-Williams

Production Stage Manager: Jamie Steffen

Technical Director: Maia Robbins Zust and Berkshire Production Resources

Set Design: Kate Sinclair Foster

Costume Design: Arthur Oliver

Music/Sound Design: Alexander Sovronsky

Set Consultant: Carl Sprague

Dates/Times:

Wednesday August 15 and Thursday Aug 16 at 5:30 pm

Saturday, August 18 and Sunday, August 19 at 3:00 pm

Wednesday August 22- Friday Aug 24 at 5:30pm

Saturday, August 25 and Sunday August 26 at 3:00 pm

Tickets: $35, General Admission. Wheelchair accessible.

Online ticketing anytime at www.whartonsalon.org

Box office for telephone orders:  1-800-838-3006

###

Normi Noël (Director, The Inner House) has directed many of the Edith Wharton and Henry James adaptations by Shakespeare & Company’s Dennis Krausnick and others, both in the Salon Theatre at the The Mount, and Springlawn Theatre, when Shakespeare & Co. moved to Kemble Street. Among those were Songs From the Heart, An International Episode, The Other Two, Roman Fever, and Xingu, re-adapted by Dennis into a one-woman show for Ventfort Hall. Over the years at S&Co she directed The Enchanted April, Hamlet, All’s Well That Ends Well, Virginia, Betrayal, The Chekhov One Acts, and others.  No Background Music, her play about Penny Rock, an army nurse in the Vietnam war, won the Sony Award for best radio drama in the UK, performed by Sigourney Weaver. She is very happy to be working back at The Mount with The Wharton Salon, Toddy, and Edith. This is for Rich.

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.

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Posted by Bess Hochstein on 08/17/11 at 10:21 AM •

Out of Time

by James Yeara on August 24, 2011 · 0 comments

Renée Margaret Speltz (Annette) holds an MFA in Acting from Minnesota State University-Mankato (MSU). Renée is thrilled to be making her debut with The Wharton Salon. Shakespeare & Company: Romeo & Juliet (Lady Montague), Winter’s Tale (Assistant Director), Les Liaisons Dangereuses (Madame Rosemonde), Cindy Bella (Fairy Godmother), Sonnet Prelude 2007 (Director); Tamer Tamed (Pedro) and Comedy of Errors (Luce). MSU: Equus (Dora Strang), Butterflies are Free (Mrs. Baker), Golden Age (Isabel Hastings Hoyt), Julius Caesar (Popilius/Ensemble), A Christmas Carol (2nd Solicitor/Chorus), and Footloose (Eleanor Dunbar). Wimbledon Studio Theatre: The Dining Room (Annie, Grace, Sandra, Old Lady and Harriet). Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota: Our Country’s Good (Meg), Uncle Harry (Hester), and Antigone (Chorus). University of Wisconsin-Eau Clare: Time of Your Life (Nick’s Ma/Killer) and Tartuffe (Madame Pernelle).