SISTER CARRIE
at the Project
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This play should be both historically relevant and timeless and universal. But somehow Touchstone’s production fails to illuminate either aspect of the novel. The problems seem to be evenly distributed between the adaptation (Creamer has done much more successful ones, most notably Goodman’s Christmas Carol) and the three leading actors.
Creamer sticks close to the book’s essential action until the very end, when several important moments are omitted. But his structure is so loose as to be almost nonexistent. He uses short scenes that shift from place to place, a sort of Nicholas Nickleby without the narration. And without either a narrator or longer scenes to better establish the mood and plot, Creamer’s Sister Carrie winds up as a series of seemingly random occurrences. The characters don’t seem to feel much, and the scenes don’t give us much information about life in the big city in the 1890s. Creamer also seems to have left it up to the actors to supply the characters’ motivations.
The production is certainly beautiful. Set and lighting designer Kevin Snow has created an elegant, simple set featuring a lot of natural wood and a gorgeous colored overhang like the ones in old train stations. Snow’s lighting isolates various levels of the set at different times, reflecting shifts in the mood and place. Patricia Hart’s period costumes are not only lovely but make immediately clear who are the haves and who the have-nots. Ina Marlowe’s staging makes the constantly shifting transitions from one location to another smooth and natural; the eye is subtly led to the place where the next scene is to begin. Even the scene changes are beautiful, choreographed almost like a dance.
You get the picture. The play itself is a little simpleminded. Still, Brecht can be a director’s playground, and this piece is no exception. Almost because the ideas are so intentionally obvious, directors are given free rein to use all of their tricks just to keep the audience’s attention while bashing them over the head with the lesson. As Brecht says in Brecht on Theatre, “Theatre remains theatre even when it is instructive theatre, and in so far as it is good theatre, it will amuse.” And although the ideas are obvious, they are lessons we have yet to learn. In this country, we still fail to take responsibility for the arms we sell to countries whose politics we abhor.
