A SUMMER REMEMBERED
The December Stagebill quotes Steve Eich calling A Summer Remembered “a sweet, nostalgic story.” As Steppenwolf’s managing director Eich may want to promote the show as a warm and fuzzy holiday diversion; happily, as director of the play Eich will have none of this. He knows, and his staging shows, that there’s precious little sweetness in Charles Nolte’s flawed but frequently compelling drama about a family, and a world, at a painful turning point.
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At a summer cottage in a Minnesota lakefront town, the Washburn clan–closely knit despite differences in outlook and emotional makeup–gather in the summer of 1938, as they have many previous summers. The year is a telltale sign of impending change: we know that when the family gathers again next summer–if indeed it does–the world will be at war. (In case we don’t get it, the characters repeatedly refer to Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach”: “And we are here as on a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night.”)
The rest of the cast matches the fine work mentioned above. As expected, Cole, Lavey, Robert Breuler, and Lucina Paquet as the Washburns, Barbara Robertson as Henry’s insecure but determined wife Flo, and Jim True as an intrusive cousin attracted to Nazi idealism (a potentially interesting but undeveloped role) are excellent. But audiences are likely to be most impressed by such little-known or new actors as Carroll, Benjaminson, the deliciously funny Kara Zediker as a bobby-soxer-to-be in hormonal overdrive, and Todd Spicer as Ted’s preteen brother Crawford, in whose memory the summer is taking shape. (Nolte’s work as an opera librettist is anticipated in Crawford’s fascination with opera, and Henry’s bullying disdain for Crawford’s bookishness is one of the play’s running themes–like Tom in The Glass Menagerie, there’s much more to Crawford than meets the eye.)
The rethinking goes beyond the acting. Larry Schanker’s Christmas-carol arrangements are subtler and more delicate, and Tom Creamer’s revised script more fully embraces Dickens’s unnervingly relevant study of a society in which only the very rich are insulated from financial distress–and his message that economic reform is impossible without moral rehabilitation among people of power. This Christmas Carol is right for the recession.
