Youth, holds an old adage only old people hold dear, is wasted on the young. With Wives of the Dead, playwright Todd Hearon proves that he’s put his own youth to good use. What’s been wasted on Hearon, it seems, is much of the advice that seasoned writers tender to those of tender age. " Write about what you know " and " Show, don’t tell " are just two of the axioms Hearon has chosen to ignore.
Based on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 19th-century short story and marked by the influence of Eugene O’Neill, Hearon’s script is unabashedly derivative, devoid of action, and driven entirely by talk. Talk, however, is all it takes to make a good play when the language is so lyrical and luminously imagistic. The 2000 Paul Green Playwrights Prize Hearon won for Wives of Dead was awarded for drama, but it honored a poet. And in this premiere production of the play, staged by the Bridge Theatre Company (which Hearon co-founded in 1994), director Rosemarie Ellis and her cast of two give the play’s poetry its due.
In the Hawthorne story, " two young and comely women sat together by the fireside, nursing their mutual and peculiar sorrows " after hearing that the two brothers they recently wed were lost and presumed dead, casualties of a war raging in 18th-century Canada. In Hearon’s update, the women by the fireside are sisters, not sisters-in-law, and their husbands are Naval officers who have been reported missing following the shattering of their ship by an unexplained explosion during the Persian Gulf War.
Set in the parlor of the decaying home Sylvia and Elizabeth grew up in and later shared with their lost husbands in a small fishing town north of Boston, the play opens just moments after the departure of a sanctimonious minister and his pious minions. At the start, and throughout much of the play, the staid and respectable Elizabeth sits quietly on the couch while her raw and cynical sister Sylvia nurses a bottle of whiskey along with sorrows both new and longstanding. After mocking the minister and ranting about her husband Anthony’s many infidelities, Sylvia turns the talk from the fate of the husbands to the fisherman father the two women lost to drink and the sea when Sylvia was nine years old. As she pours over her own sharp tongue teacup after teacup of the 80-proof elixir her adored dad favored, Sylvia pries open closets the sisters’ prudish mother always kept locked — until she herself was locked away in a nursing home with Alzheimer’s. By the end of the play, the bottle is more than half-empty, the sitting room is littered with the family’s dirty linen, and skeletons more menacing than either sister ever imagined haunt the house.
The vitriolic rehashing that’s accomplished here brings to mind the dramas in which O’Neill sets his characters to similar tasks. Hearon’s language, however, is entirely original. Although rhythmic and often lyrical, the dialogue flows and overlaps like everyday speech. And conjured up in different contexts, Hearon’s images morph and gain resonance with repetition, adding emotional weight and thematic coherence in increments. More than anything else, the language accounts for the play’s primal power. Through poetry, Hearon makes the familiar new.
Under the detailed direction provided by Ellis, who has an ear as sharp as her eye, Kara Crowe and Phyllis Rittner maintain a close rapport from start to end. Rittner is a master of small gestures, and her repressed Elizabeth expresses in her demeanor what she can’t bring herself to say. Crowe’s Sylvia is a lost and fragile girl hiding behind a tough-babe façade, more attached to her ideals and her innocence than she lets on. Together they capture the cadences of Hearon’s language without compromising its naturalness. Attuned to nuance and to each other, they waste not a word, making even the silences sing.
