WUTHERING HEIGHTS
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Our culture tends to think of love as the great panacea–so much so that it seems impossible love might also be a great pathogen. To be sure, AIDS and the divorce rate have demonstrated the wisdom of tempering passion with prudence, but these problems are easily dismissed, their existence just one more reason to cherish the notion of a pure, con- stant, all-consuming devotion. Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, first published in 1847, may be read today as a lament for love doomed by a corrupt world, or as a fable about the folly of loving too rashly, or even as a sociological treatise on how poverty and abuse can turn the most innocent of children into erotic psychopaths.
Jeff Casazza’s deftly constructed adaptation retains Bronte’s intricate story and her flamboyant language, distilling the dense narrative to an amazing two and a half hours–which, thanks to David Zak’s swift-paced direction, passes as if in minutes. Zak also manages to suggest the scope of a story in which all of nature must sympathize with the protagonists–a basic motif in Romantic literature–by providing four black-cloaked chorus men whose dusky menace evokes the wild and blasted Yorkshire heath.
