The Plush ‘Age of Innocence’ Overstays its Welcome
Arena Stage's "The Age of Innocence" burns so slowly that the production's dramatic flame nearly fizzles out.
Beautiful gowns and vibrant performances bring glamorous life to Arena Stage’s plush Gilded Age drama The Age of Innocence. But the pleasures of those finer qualities fade over the course of a stiffly-paced production that takes too long to get where it needs to go.
Hana S. Sharif stages the play on the voluminous in-the-round Fichandler Stage with minimal scenery — all the better for focusing attention on the fraught interactions and slight but meaningful gestures that drive Edith Wharton’s Pulitzer-winning novel, adapted for the stage by renowned D.C. playwright Karen Zacarías.
Sharif spreads that focus to all four corners of the Fichandler, with several scenes of characters seated in opposing boxes at the Academy of Music in 1870s New York. Following along, like the crowd at a tennis match, as courtly lovers and relations volley furtive glances across the arena is both engaging and, in due time, exhausting.
Not that running time matters — except when it does. Martin Scorsese, no stranger to making a long story long, adapted Wharton’s slow-simmering romance between society scion Newland Archer and scandal-plagued divorcée Countess Ellen Olenska into an Oscar-winning film that’s over two hours but is still an hour shorter than this play.
In her adaptation, Zacarías forgoes brevity to elaborate each plot turn in detail, often through the arch narration of Felicia Curry’s incandescent Granny Mingott, the family matriarch who does quite a bit of plotting herself.
Both a bastion of New York society, and someone sympathetic to modern, independent women like Countess Ellen (Shereen Ahmed), Granny Mingott is a woman of her times and ahead of her times, and Curry connects her to us with little pretense. Meanwhile, others in the company appear to be projecting through proverbial lace, performing in a period play.
A.J. Shively’s Newland is credibly lovestruck, if a bit bland to see as the man who would steal the hesitant heart of Ahmed’s smoldering Countess. The pair are posited as torchbearers of desire and repression, but the portrayal doesn’t convey passion so much as persistence.
Delphi Borich invests her May Welland, Newland’s well-bred young fiancée, with a quiet passion that does resonate. May is bright and girlish, naïve but not stupid, and Borich allows us to see the wit of this young woman, who, ultimately, is smarter about plotting in secret than anyone might have expected.
May very much takes after her Granny Mingott. Along with the Countess, and May’s mother Mrs. Welland (Natalya Lynette Rathnam) and mother-in-law Mrs. Archer (Regina Aquino), they represent diverse generations of women facing the time’s changing mores and opportunities.
Alas, the production doesn’t put that point, or any point, across with much urgency. But everyone stays dressed to the nines, courtesy of Fabio Toblini’s jaw-droppingly gorgeous costumes. At times, Curry, serving up Granny in a fabulous frock, lit stunningly by Xavier Pierce, is all the atmosphere the show has or needs.
Set designer Tim Mackabee occasionally adds a modest tableau of chairs and tables that rise up on a lift from beneath the stage. Then, at odd times, the lift descends, leaving a sizable pit for the performers to maneuver around in a precarious dance one can’t help watching anxiously as the minutes steadily tick away.
The Age of Innocence (★★☆☆☆) runs through March 30 at Arena Stage, 1101 6th St. SW. Tickets are $45 to $99. Call 202-488-3300, or visit www.arenastage.org.
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