Smart Play, And Disturbing, Too

It’s a smart, tidy play, “The Heiress,” and, even with no surprises, riveting. No surprises because we know Catherine Sloper (Jill Wanderman), a plain and graceless woman, is being wooed for her fortune (back in the 19th century when $30,000 a year was real money in New York). No doubt about it. Penniless Morris Townsend (Jonathan Slocum) may be courting the doctor’s daughter, but he makes clear in a moment alone in the Washington Square drawing room, sweeping his arm along the fireplace mantel, that what he wants is to live as rich people do. Dr. Austin Sloper (handsomely played by Tracy Trimm) objects. Morris, he claims, though charming and intelligent, is most certainly an opportunist marrying his daughter for her money. Which is curious because lots of happy marriages were (and still are) based on a woman’s fortune. (Remember the impecunious British aristocrats seeking wealthy American wives to keep their castles afloat?) We wonder about the doctor’s opposition. And we wonder, too, because he disdains his daughter so. “Help her to be clever,” he asks his sister, Lavinia. “You are good for nothing unless you are clever.” “I’ll never understand it,” he adds. “Her mother was so graceful.” But her mother died in childbirth, leaving Austin alone with a busy and sometimes charitable practice and a child he sears with insult at every opportunity. Still, he aims to keep his daughter, gauche and dim as she may be, with him. Forever. And though the play does not quite address this dark and uneasy notion, it won’t go away. The doctor needs Catherine. He will not let her go to another man. The script, based on the Henry James novel “Washington Square,” and written for the stage by Ruth and Augustus Goetz, is a marvel of clarity, even beauty at times. But the production is weakened by the heiress’s deer-in-the-headlights style of acting. And when she comes into her own, as we knew she would, we get too much hauteur and not enough chilling resolve. Still, this is a gem of a play. Forget the terrible wigs and awful costumes and enjoy the dandy script.

Latest News

South Kent School’s unofficial March reunion

Elmarko Jackson was named a 2023 McDonald’s All American in his senior year at South Kent School. He helped lead the Cardinals to a New England Prep School Athletic Conference (NEPSAC) AAA title victory and was recruited to play at the University of Kansas. This March he will play point guard for the Jayhawks when they enter the tournament as a No. 4 seed against (13) Samford University.

Riley Klein

SOUTH KENT — March Madness will feature seven former South Kent Cardinals who now play on Division 1 NCAA teams.

The top-tier high school basketball program will be well represented with graduates from each of the past three years heading to “The Big Dance.”

Keep ReadingShow less
Hotchkiss grads dancing with Yale

Nick Townsend helped Yale win the Ivy League.

Screenshot from ESPN+ Broadcast

LAKEVILLE — Yale University advanced to the NCAA men’s basketball tournament after a buzzer-beater win over Brown University in the Ivy League championship game Sunday, March 17.

On Yale’s roster this year are two graduates of The Hotchkiss School: Nick Townsend, class of ‘22, and Jack Molloy, class of ‘21. Townsend wears No. 42 and Molloy wears No. 33.

Keep ReadingShow less
Handbells of St. Andrew’s to ring out Easter morning

Anne Everett and Bonnie Rosborough wait their turn to sound notes as bell ringers practicing to take part in the Easter morning service at St. Andrew’s Church.

Kathryn Boughton

KENT—There will be a joyful noise in St. Andrew’s Church Easter morning when a set of handbells donated to the church some 40 years ago are used for the first time by a choir currently rehearsing with music director Susan Guse.

Guse said that the church got the valuable three-octave set when Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center closed in the late 1980s and the bells were donated to the church. “The center used the bells for music therapy for younger patients. Our priest then was chaplain there and when the center closed, he brought the bells here,” she explained.

Keep ReadingShow less
Picasso’s American debut was a financial flop
Picasso’s American debut was a financial flop
Penguin Random House

‘Picasso’s War” by Foreign Affairs senior editor Hugh Eakin, who has written about the art world for publications like The New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and The New York Times, is not about Pablo Picasso’s time in Nazi-occupied Paris and being harassed by the Gestapo, nor about his 1937 oil painting “Guernica,” in response to the aerial bombing of civilians in the Basque town during the Spanish Civil War.

Instead, the Penguin Random House book’s subtitle makes a clearer statement of intent: “How Modern Art Came To America.” This war was not between military forces but a cultural war combating America’s distaste for the emerging modernism that had flourished in Europe in the early decades of the 20th century.

Keep ReadingShow less