New Look, Old Wolfe

Adaptations of famous literary works, whether to screen or stage, are limited by the time an audience is willing to sit for them. In the end, if you are familiar with the longer text-based work, you debate with the adapting dramatist over what might have been saved, what might have been cut. It is always an imperfect product, simply because of its necessary connection with-and inability to equal-the original masterwork.

Such is the case with PlayMakers Repertory Company's production of Look Homeward, Angel, a play by Ketti Frings based on the novel by Thomas Wolfe, modern literature's most unjustly ignored master.

In contemporary theatre, the play is already a three-hour behemoth, including two intermissions. Wolfe's novel is a monster of 625 pages, and the extra time given to dramatize a small part of the novel-a few weeks in 1916- is deserved and well worth it.

Look Homeward, Angel, the novel, is a fictionalized look at Wolfe's own family and upbringing in Asheville, NC and Frings' play preserves this. But instead of focusing as intently on the life of emerging writer Eugene Gant as Wolfe's kunstlerroman did, the play brings more of the family into high relief and seems to work at solidifying Wolfe's attempts at building an American mythology.

Central to that particular creation is Wolfe's idea of loneliness. It is an idea based on the fact that individuals never truly come to know one another and never understand the gravity of their own lives while they're living them. The character of Eliza Gant, aptly played by stage veteran Kathleen Nolan, best articulates this idea of the inexorable loss of time, the tragedy of it and the insignificant conversations we make with ourselves and others in order to distract ourselves from this knowledge.

Eliza is a woman of property, the owner of a boarding house named Dixieland, who is forever after her family to work harder, save money and make something of themselves. Eugene, her son-played ably, if secondarily by Liam Gearity-rebels against her prodding and dreams of the day when he can go to school at none other than the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. (Yes, it is slightly surreal to be watching the life of Wolfe-who went on to co-found PlayMakers Repertory-at his alma mater, but such is life).

If anything, Eliza is often too large a presence on the stage. Nolan's rendering towers over the other characters, alternately brow-beating them into submission and asking them to sympathize with her. Struck in the cast of a sympathetic villain, she goes through life collecting property, oblivious to the tragedy of the buried life moving constantly beneath her.

In relation to the other family members-an exhausted daughter, an often-drunk grave-stone cutter husband and the brothers Eugene and Ben-Eliza stands like a truly tragic heroine and in the end, we expect her fall to be great.