Bibliofile

A voice in the crowd

by Chris Wright

One of the main challenges of reading is finding a voice to fit the text. Bombarded as we are with words, words, words, all too often one's inner voice recites a work of fiction in much the same tone as it does a newspaper story, an advertising flier, or a menu.

What a joy, then, to attend a reading at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge earlier this week, hosted by PEN New England, in which three actors gave distinctive and compelling voices to a trio of tales from The Best American Short Stories 2000 (Houghton Mifflin paperback, 320 pages, $13).

The first of these, Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri's "The Third and Final Continent," was read by two-time Tony Award-winning actor Hume Cronyn. Not surprisingly, the veteran actor captured the understated humor and pathos of Lahiri's tale with effortless aplomb.

"Hume is such an old pro," says novelist Sue Miller, who served as MC. "He's not just mouthing the words. You get a real sense of the drama, the narrative thrust of the story."

The toughest job of the night fell to Shakespearean actor Carolyn Roberts, who not only had to follow Lahiri's and Cronyn's formidable double act, but had to assume the voice of the vicious and utterly unreliable narrator in Amy Bloom's "The Story." "It was wonderful," says Roberts. "I felt like I kept people off-balance. I felt them coming with me on the journey."

Finally, ART regular Will LeBow had the audience hooting as he read from Alan Gurganis's domestic tragicomedy "He's at the Office." To judge by the ear-popping applause, LeBow's reading was a hit -- and so was the evening as a whole.

"People love to be read to," says Miller. "I think we forget that we don't often have the opportunity to do this as adults. It's a very atavistic thing, a very primitive feeling. Storytelling is as old as words, and we respond to it in a very deep way."

She adds, "It's not the way you heard the story in your own head."