84, CHARING CROSS ROAD
Northlight Theatre
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The play was adapted by James Roose-Evans from the anthologized letters of writer Helene Hanff and British bookseller Frank Doel, written between 1949 and 1969. Hanff, a Jew from Philadelphia, possesses a keen interest in British Catholicism; living in New York on a bare-bones budget in the years after World War II, trying to make it as a writer, she begins ordering from a shop in London works by poet-preacher John Donne and John Henry Cardinal Newman, and the fourth-century Vulgate Bible. Starved for conversation, and virtually tied to her typewriter, Hanff seems hardly ever to leave her fifth-floor walk-up except to mail yet another letter to London. Why go to a New York bookstore when she can have antiquarian volumes delivered to her doorstep? Fairly soon, the correspondence between Hanff and Doel, manager of the musty Marx and Company bookshop in Charing Cross Road, grows more conversational; when the gift-giving holidays approach, Hanff sends a package of meat to her new friend in heavily rationed England. The books and the meats keep crossing the Atlantic, the letters grow warmer (though it is clear that Doel is contentedly married, a fact Hanff accepts with uncomfortable ambivalence), and Hanff lays plans to visit London as soon as she can afford it.
If this were just a story about two bibliophiles babbling at each other across the Atlantic, 84, Charing Cross Road would be only a quaint intellectual entertainment with a limited audience. Certainly those who are bookishly inclined will feel right at home here; most of the dialogue (that is, the alternating monologues, as the characters speak aloud the letters they’re writing) concerns the more arcane nooks and crannies of English literature. But what gives 84, Charing Cross Road its universal poignance is what’s happening between the lines: the story of a person who puts aside something precious until it’s too late to claim it, a story that sends a strong jolt of recognition through the viewer. Russell Vandenbroucke (with last-minute assistance from B.J. Jones) has directed the play with beautiful simplicity, finding plenty of activity to keep the stage interesting and to bring out the subtext under most of the letters. Michael Merritt’s excellent set positions Hanff’s apartment and Doel’s shop, both with their walls packed with books, right next to each other, yet (in tandem with Linda Essig’s tightly focused lighting) maintains a perfect sense of separation between the two locations and the people who inhabit them. Nan Zabriskie’s costumes nicely complement the setting’s strong sense of time and place.
Sheer energy is in abundant supply in this entertaining effort at Bailiwick Repertory. The seven-person ensemble runs, hops, and rolls about the stage, impersonating a seemingly endless collection of monsters–complete with lots of scary and frequently gross sound effects–and enacting such confrontations as a fight with sticks and a game of “death-match ticktacktoe.” The cast is good at audience interaction, too; in the show’s main gimmick the viewers are invited to vote, by clapping, on what should happen at certain points in the story.
