'Great Expectations' at the Arden Theatre (2nd review)

Although many discerning readers think of Great Expectations as a masterpiece, I found an equal number of people who have bad memories of the book. Even those who revere the novel are not necessarily fans of stage versions. So how did director Matthew Decker and his team turn it into a box-office success?

The adapter, Gale Childs Daly, is a graduate of the Goodman School of Drama in Chicago and is associated with that theater company. When this play was staged in Chicago in 2013, the set was filled with tall wooden bookcases, and the actors started scenes by reading aloud from books they pulled from the library shelves. Gradually, attention shifted from the seated readers to the characters in action.

Matt Decker chose to put more emphasis on dramatic staging and less on the books, although the source of the words was made clear as the actors shifted between first- and third-person address. The sets were suggestive rather than explicit. Place was defined by lighting, costuming, and a few simple props, plus the changing positions of the actors on the thrust platform. The large size of the stage in relation to the seating area emphasized the immensity of Dickens's saga.

Theatrical but hard to stage

Great Expectations is the most theatrical of Dickens’s novels, including one scene of a production of Hamlet and another of a musical vaudeville. On the other hand, it resists theatrical staging because of its sprawling story, which stretches over 28 years and involves dozens of characters.

In this production, five of the actors divide 39 characters while a sixth one maintains the center of attention as the orphan boy who is given a fortune by a mysterious benefactor. Josh Carpenter is properly earnest as Philip Pirrip, known as Pip, as he matures from youthful innocence to morally questionable social climber to sobered adult.

As fine an ensemble as you’re likely to see all year is brilliantly directed by Decker, who blocked the twists and turns with meticulous precision and perfect timing.

Brian McCann, Kate Czajkowski, Doug Hara, Lindsay Smiling, and Sally Mercer shined in a variety of roles. Among the standout characterizations were Czajkowski’s haughty Estella, McCann as the desperate escaped convict Magwitch, Hara’s loyal friend Herbert, Smiling’s blacksmith, and Mercer’s manipulative Miss Havisham, who was jilted at the altar when she was a young woman. Each of them transformed walk, accent, and gestures to make immediately clear when they were switching characters.

My only reservation is that the fire that killed Miss Havisham was not spectacular enough. The incident is so special that Dominick Argento wrote an opera (Miss Havisham’s Fire) about it, and I craved a more gruesome representation.

For a review by Naomi Orwin, click here.