The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
2 Dougs team on ‘Age of Innocence’
Pair prep period piece for Hartford Stage
Directors, like actors, resent typecasting as bad for business and a drag on their artistic expression. Doug Hughes is one director who has successfully eluded such pigeonholing during his prodigiously varied career of nearly 40 years.
Currently at the helm of Hartford Stage’s “The Age of Innocence,” a world premiere of Doug McGrath’s adaptation of Edith Wharton’s 1921 Pulitzer Prize-wining novel, Hughes deftly moves from Shakespeare to Shaw to Shanley with equal aplomb. He feeds his omnivorous theatrical appetite a serving of Bryony Lavary’s “Frozen” (2004) — a wrought drama where a mother confronts her 10year-old daughter’s murderer — and chases it with Garson Kanin’s classic American comedy “Born Yesterday” for dessert (2011).
“I like to think that I don’t have a steady diet of anything,” said Hughes before a recent rehearsal of “The Age of Innocence,” which starts previews Thursday and officially opens April 13.
“The last play I did in the fall was a play about debt finances and its consequence on American
economy and American life,” said Hughes, referring to Ayad Akhtar’s “Junk,” which opened on Broadway last November. “It’s been a long time since I’ve directed what is called a ‘costume drama.’”
Though set primarily in America’s Gilded Age, “The Age of Innocence” is not strictly a costume drama, Hughes said.
“This is a profound love story that’s been adapted from a masterpiece,” said Hughes of “The Age of Innocence,” which runs through May 6. “But adapted with phenomenal dramatic skill so that there’s a really forceful concentration on what’s essential ... the love affair, (which is) more important than the social satire of the late 19th century in this country, or the absolute, wonderful descriptive passages about architecture and such.”
Hughes met McGrath through their mutual agent, George Lane at Creative Artists Agency. Lane suggested that two Dougs are better than one, as McGrath said from his home in New York.
“My agent thought Doug was
an ideal choice for it because he has a beautiful grounding in all eras of theater,” McGrath said. “He understands classical theater, he understands modern theater, and he really connected on this.
“You find out very quickly if you and the director see it the same way,” said McGrath, represented at the Shubert Theatre last month with “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical,” for which he wrote the book. “He had some enthusiasm for it, so I went to meet him, and as soon as we fell into conversation with each other, we found that we both shared this admiration and excitement over the story.
“But also he had a very exciting way that he was thinking about staging it that just seemed right to me,” said McGrath, who previously adapted Jane Austin’s “Emma” and Dickens’ “Nicholas Nickleby” for film. “So it’s been a very happy partnership.”
Specifically, McGrath agreed with Hughes’ plan to zero in on the love story that drives Wharton’s rich tale through the clutter of period set dressing, heavy costumes and physical refinement associated with Victorian fare.
“My play has many, many locations,” McGrath said. “From the beginning, Doug said, ‘Let’s not encumber ourselves with the antique carpets and curtains and drapes, and the silver trays and all that stuff. Let’s focus on the people and keep things moving.’”
“It’s about who do you love?” said Hughes. “And who do you decide you can love? And who are you going to spend the rest of your live with? What are the varieties of love? And that often those varieties are at odds with each other.
“I think that’s more important than bustles and fish forks. So the emphasis has been on that. But, do we have a bustle or two? Yes, we do. But we do it with a very spare theatrical language.”
Hughes, who returns to Connecticut regional theater for the third time (after two trips to Westport Country Playhouse) since serving as Long Wharf Theatre’s artistic director from 1997-2001, said that in this adaptation, McGrath strikes that felicitous balance of capturing Wharton’s genius and enriching it with “invention of his own.”
“There are many, many techniques and incidents,” said Hughes, “and in one beautiful
case, (McGrath includes) two characters that don’t appear in the novel, in order to respond to what he believed was essential about this great novel. So one of the great things about the adaptation is that ... it is 100 percent respectful, and it pays the novel the respect of being free enough, to be inspiring enough, to depart from the structure and methods of a novel so that something can live onstage.
“I think an utterly worshipful adaptation abiding by every character might be eight hours on the BBC. We’re trying to tell the story in about 95 minutes on the stage at Hartford and, again, it’s a concentrated experience.”
This leads the discussion back to Hughes’ initial conceit of staging the play with uncluttered “fluidity with fullness,” as he put it.
“What I see is an open and quite ... beautiful environment,” Hughes said. “(Scenic designer) John Lee Beatty has done this beautiful space for the play. It is all the places in the play, and yet it is one place. Everything in the show is driven by the actors — all 14 of them. That, again, seems to me to be the way to keep things fluid, but also to choose
essential detail.
“More important than that, of course, is grounding each scene in some reality,” Hughes said while praising his large cast headed by four-time Tony winner Boyd Gaines.
Hughes, born to beloved actors Helen Stenborg and Barnard Hughes, said that Wharton’s story is too timeless to bury under period garb and accoutrements.
“It is such an astonishing, modern novel,” he said. “I think it’s one of the great books, in a weight class that I think is inhabited by, to pick one at-random title, ‘The Great Gatsby.’ There’s such acute insight.
“I think it must’ve been painful to be Edith Wharton. She seemed so frighteningly aware of everything in a room. She has that empathy that allows her to understand her hero at the center of the book and his agonies and his ecstasies. In the meantime, she’s aware of the preoccupations and the fears and the hopes of everyone that surrounds him.
“This is a long way of saying that I admire the book and I admire the adaptation. The more I work on it, the more my admiration for both grows.”