Despite the philosophic passages, introspective musings, pageantry, and Russian geography of Leo Tolstoy’s supreme achievement in novel form, Anna Karenina is also a whopping good story whose characters are so finely drawn that one comes to love them as friends. So it’s no wonder Helen Edmundson thought to adapt the work for the theater, even if the task of competing with the imagination of readers who have loved the book was not an easy one. Never mind the challenge of condensing a chronological epic of 850 pages into two and a half hours of stage time.

Edmundson makes the co-protagonists, Anna and Levin, narrators. As they meet to describe their lives to each other in order to explain Tolstoy’s motives for intertwining the fates of two such disparate persons, the adaptation unfolds clearly from start to finish. Edmundson employs the simple device of having Anna and Levin stop on occasion and ask each other, " Where are you now? " The question serves as a theatrical page marker, putting you in the proper time and place, helping delineate each of the characters, and untangling family relationships. And at Wellesley, director Nora Hussey’s skill at translating the encounters into stage pictures adds to the creation of engrossing drama.

Like Greek tragedy, where the finish is foretold, the viewer looks on with dread but fascination at follies committed without thought of retribution. In Tolstoy’s Christian universe, no sin goes unpunished, and in the man’s world of upper-class 19th-century Russia, the woman who behaves like Eve must be expelled from the Garden of Eden, i.e., the round of balls, opera going, and trading of afternoon calls that passes time for the privileged wives and daughters of tsarist Russia.

Tolstoy announces the theme of his book in perhaps the most famous lines in 19th-century literature — " Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in it own way " — and then shows how it is true. The play, like the novel, follows three married couples: the philandering Prince " Stiva " Oblonsky and his wife, Dolly; Levin, the country squire who loves Kitty, Dolly’s sister; and Stiva’s sister, Anna Karenina, and her husband, the distinguished government official Karenin. The story begins when Kitty is 18 and Anna a young, married woman with a son. When Anna meets Count Vronsky, who has been courting Kitty, he and the married woman begin an impassioned affair that leads to consequences for everyone.

The structure of the cat’s cradle of desires rests on the character of Anna, whom we must believe to be a descendant of Helen of Troy in her ability to bewitch Vronsky while driving her husband to despair with jealousy, as well as to attract the sympathy of the pure-of-heart Levin. Alicia Kahn, who has played a number of roles for the now-year-’round-operating Wellesley Summer Theatre, makes Anna a woman who behaves in public as a decorous femme fatale but turns into a wild woman in the intimate scenes. Angry and possessive, she is enchanting and demonic in her delight at trading her dull husband for Vronsky and besting the younger Kitty. She’s positively beautiful in the period gowns designed by Katherine Hall, holding the spotlight with a glowing complexion and magnetic eyes. And she’s sensual beyond the ordinary, particularly in the racetrack scene, where she replaces Vronsky’s beloved mare, Frou-Frou, as his mount — an effective metaphor for the couple’s intense lovemaking.

If not quite a matinee hero, Derek Stone Nelson, as Vronsky, is properly troubled by his responsibility for the woman he has ensnared. Bern Budd gives a compassionate portrait of the always questioning Levin. The rest of the cast is uneven but good enough to carry the action. I do hope that Melina McGrew, as Kitty, will grow into the more sparkling ingenue described by Tolstoy.

Wellesley Summer Theatre is to be congratulated for its achievement in bringing Anna Karenina to the stage. The production captures the poignancy of these lives, despite the bare-stage setting and the actors’ doubling in roles to represent the vast sweep of characters of the novel. Edmundson and Hussey have accomplished what some might not have thought possible: without disappointing those familiar with the original, they provide an accessible introduction for those to whom Tolstoy’s characters, in the fullness of their humanity and the grandeur of their aspirations, are strangers.