A 17th-century heroine in a book from 1850, Hester Prynne has escaped both eras to personify all victims of the sexual double standard. Acknowledging the plight of his bold sinner in the conclusion to his novel, Nathaniel Hawthorne argues the need for a “surer ground of mutual happiness” between men and women. The prime targets in Lookingglass Theatre Company’s bold but uneven adaptation by ensemble member Thomas J. Cox are New England hypocrisy at its most mean spirited and the sex fears that fuel it.
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But unlike the stylized movement of Lookingglass’s recent The Arabian Nights, much of the movement here lacks motive. It’s employed for effect and doesn’t connect with the characters. One reason may be the challenge that dogs any adaptation of The Scarlet Letter: how do you dramatize the secret sin that lies at the heart of the work?
In Cox’s stage pictures these concealed emotions often seem either overexposed or confined to the narration. The production seems to bounce from the visual and physical (the chorus of gesticulating Puritans) to simple verbal recitations (the stilted dialogue taken straight–and stiff–from Hawthorne). Curiously, the novel’s most dramatic scenes–which take place on the scaffold in the village marketplace and which ought to provide the peaks for each act–are relegated to stage right, receiving no more emphasis than the stylized sections.
Gogol’s “Diary of a Madman” depicts an obscure filing clerk in a czarist bureaucracy whose mind slowly becomes unhinged as he falls hopelessly in love with his superior’s daughter. Refusing to admit he’s only a disposable functionary, he slowly hallucinates a better world in which dogs correspond with each other and newspapers send him secret messages. His diary entries chart both his mental breakdown (from “October 3” to “April 43, 2000”) and the astonishment of the hostile outside world, as he sees it, at learning that he’s the rightful heir to the Spanish throne.
