Kate Hamill has nerve. To suit her playwriting purposes, she indulges in what she calls “reclaiming” the classics. Her “reclaiming” becomes, in her term, “radical adaptation.” Having had her rather entertaining and only mildly radical way with, among others, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, and William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, she’s now gone hog-wild-radical with Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women.
To begin, let’s just say this is not your mother’s (or father’s) and their mother’s (and father’s) Little Women. If you’re fond of that authorized version published in successive 1868 and 1869 volumes, you may have a difficult time with Hamill’s loosey-goosey alteration. Let’s just say further that, while there’s no way to read Hamill’s mind on her “radical adaptation,” her impetus could be she suspects if were Alcott writing her enduring classic today, this saucy treatment is how she would have quill-penned it.
[Read Michael Sommers’ ★★★ review here.]
You all remember that of the four sisters who are Alcott’s little women—Meg, Josephine called Jo, Beth, and Amy—Jo is the most prominent. She’s the one who, during the Civil War when her father goes to battle as a chaplain, is writing plays for the sisters to perform on Christmas Day. She’s the one who initially befriends rich boy-next-door Laurie and is soon best pals with him. She’s the one who cuts her hair for a $25 dollar remuneration so that her mother can travel to ailing Mr. March. She’s the one who earns an income as a New York City teacher and befriends a German professor there with whom she falls in love. She’s the one who learns from reticent professor Bhaer that her writing Gothic thrillers isn’t the path to genuine fiction but that writing about what she knows—eventually Beth’s life and death—is the way to go.
At its core, Little Women is the story of a tomboy who outgrows her childhood behaviors and becomes a mature woman of intelligence, determination, talent and charm. For that and for Alcott’s depiction of one family’s home-front endurance during a divisive nation’s crisis, Jo is the center of a bestseller then and a bestseller now.
To some extent, that’s Hamill’s tale, too, but to an even greater extent, she gives it a contemporary spin for these LGBTA/LGBTQ days. She homes in on Jo, whom she doesn’t view so much as a tomboy but as a person contending—though she’s only vague about it—with gender assignment. First seen in man’s clothes (as Roderigo in the sword-flashing role she’s written for herself), Jo affects attitudes generally thought masculine. For instance, she straddles chairs. When Laurie and she dance at a neighbor’s party, they’re uncertain as to which should lead. This prompts Laurie, who’s also confused about gender assignment (!) to declare he sometimes wishes he were a girl and performs a little flounce to emphasis his velleity (which for those of you not up on your 19th century terminology is an inclination not quite strong enough to lead to action). Is Louisa May sitting somewhere, scratching her head over this?
Perhaps Hamill knows that Alcott originally intended Jo to remain a writing spinster and only attached her to Bhaer when pressured by her publishers. (Alcott never married.) That might explain why Hamill eliminates the entire Little Women segment involving Bhaer and instead has it that Beth is the one encouraging Jo to write “true stories,” stories based on the old piece of advice to authors: write what you know.
Before Hamill gets to the final blackout, she’s done practically everything to establish Jo’s gender balking but have her demand to be referred to as “they/them.” Elsewhere she even has Alcott’s sweet, homebody Meg come crying to Jo about hubby John Brooks chastising her about not properly tending to their twins. Complaining between tears, she says John called her hysterical and rants about hysteria being the noun men all too often hang on women. (The anachronistic outburst gets a hand from many in the audience, cheap shot that it is.)
On Mikiko Suzuki MacAdam’s two-level set and under Paul Whitaker’s lighting design, Kate Hamill is hysteria-ridden Meg to Kristolyn Lloyd’s Jo, Paola Sanchez Abreu’s Beth, Carmen Zilles’ Amy, Maria Elena Ramirez’s Marmee and Aunt March, Nate Mann’s Laurie, Ellen Harvey’s retainer Hannah and others, John Lenartz’s Mr. March and others, and Michael Crane’s John Brooks and others, including a parrot(!). They’re all sufficient to their tasks, under Sarna Lapine’s sufficient direction.
In her program note. Hamill writes about updating the classics: “I do not believe that these stories deserve to be treated as museum pieces.” But who does believe that? Who does consign classics to museums? Classics are classics because they so universal in myriad ways that they stay cogent no matter when they’re encountered. They hardly require upstart ideas on nudging them into renewed life. Long past Hamill’s presumptuous manipulation, Alcott’s Little Women will be as modern as ever depicting those four unforgettable young girls becoming women in individual ways.
Little Women opened June 4, 2019, at the Cherry Lane Theatre and runs through June 29. Tickets and information: primarystages.org
