'Antonia' takes the long road 'Antonia' takes the long road (April 09, 2004)

Theatreworks closes season with long-winded world premiere

By Julie O'Shea

Live-action adaptations of well-loved books are always tricky. Long before they hit the stage or movie screen, they must first face a skeptical, fiercely loyal fan base, torn over whether a script can possibly do justice to a novelist's original story. Undoubtedly, such works have seen mixed results over the years -- some soaring to critical success, others bombing miserably.

Scott Schwartz's take on Willa Cather's "My Antonia" falls somewhere in between. The TheatreWorks production -- which had its world premiere at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts last weekend -- is magnificently staged and beautifully composed.

However, at three hours and two intermissions, the show becomes tiresome. In trying to stay true to Cather's work, Schwartz, who also directs, squeezes in too much, losing his audience several times with rambling narrative that reads more like a spirited book-on-tape rather than a full-length play.

It is obvious that Schwartz knew exactly where he wanted to go with "Antonia," a story of young love and life in 19th-century Nebraska; each scene seamlessly evaporates into the next. This is thanks, in part, to some breathtaking work by lighting designer Pamila Gray and inspiring incidental music from award-winning composer Stephen Schwartz (the director's father and one of the driving forces behind Broadway's "Godspell" and "Pippin").

"Antonia" is a memory play, laced with sadness and punctuated with occasional humor.

A hardened corporate lawyer living in New York, Jim (an unwaveringly staunch Michael Butler) finds himself on a train headed toward Blackhawk, the prairie town he grew up in and hasn't visited in two decades. As the train chugs west, repressed memories flood onto the stage, as Jim reminisces about his childhood and the girl he had left behind.

On the surface, Ian Leonard, who plays the teenaged Jim, and Jessica Meyers as Antonia, certainly make an attractive couple. Unfortunately, neither manages to dig deeper than their characters' subtext. Leonard plays Jim with doe-eyed naivete that ceases to be cute after the first act. And Meyer never seems to let Antonia stray far from bubbly optimism, no matter how tough her life is.

Some of Blackhawk's more sensational citizens, Louis Parnell's sleazy Wick Cutter and Anne Buelteman as his busybody wife, Mrs. Cutter, are a hoot. This bickering pair, along with Lianne Marie Dobbs' pop-tart portrayal of Lena Lingard, the town priss, and Nancy Sauder as the zingy dancing queen, Mrs. Vanni, help add a bit of color to the bleak Nebraskan frontier.

Also interesting is Scott Schwartz's choice to use the entire cast as one narrative voice, a unique touch, if a bit confusing at times.

But these things hardly make up for the snail-slow pace of the show where the actors spend way too much time just yakking around the swimming hole. While Cather's words are indeed poetic, Schwartz waits too long to deliver the plot, causing his cast to lose some of the play's early momentum.

But Schwartz still somehow finds a way to make us care about these characters and their uncertain futures, forcing us to wait out the end, which is surprisingly poignant.

E-mail Julie O'Shea at joshea@mv-voice.com

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