Cold comforts

Trinity Rep's well-played Sonata

by Carolyn Clay

THE NEW ENGLAND SONATA. By Eliza Anderson. Directed by Amanda Dehnert. Set design by David Jenkins. Costumes by William Lane. Lighting by Deb Sullivan. Sound by Peter Sasha Hurowitz. With Timothy Crowe, Amy Van Nostrand, Barbara Meek, Andy MacDonald, and Benjamin E.M. Lovejoy. At Trinity Repertory Company through April 14.

Timothy Crowe and Amy Van Nostrand

Like the Trinity Rep Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? that was directed by Amanda Dehnert and designed by David Jenkins, this world premiere of The New England Sonata, with the same pair on board, presents the bare wood frame of a house -- in this case one surrounded by pine woods. But whereas Edward Albee's play has enough crackling fat for actors to chew until their jaws tire, Eliza Anderson's new work, a rumination on art and mortality, is as skeletal as the set. Often writers tell you too much, but Anderson sets a spare, if studied, table.

The New England Sonata presents a married couple, writers living in spartan New England isolation, their delicate balance shifted by intrusions of illness, madness, and a mother/mother-in-law who doesn't understand the austerity of their insular, artistic life. Florida resident Eleanor doesn't think much of Emily Dickinson either, holed up as she was in Amherst obscurity weaving verse from life and death and Nature when she could have been somewhere warm, smelling the bougainvillea. It's not the weather, Eleanor counsels, that beckons old folks to the Sunshine State; it's the "abundance." But novelist Wallace and his 15-years-younger poet wife Clara are allied, as is everything that lives in northern climes, with the seasons, those yearly approximations of nascence, growth, withering, and death.

Anderson's play is nicely and carefully written, its themes of (in the author's words) "creativity, spirituality, and mortality -- the small questions in life" set in something like a verbal sonata, with an exposition, development, recapitulation, and coda. In fact, the piece is more composed than conventionally plotted (motifs tootled in the opening scene recur and interweave). Eleanor, we learn, has come north to the "penurious" terrain of New England because son Wallace has been diagnosed with an incurable illness. A partisan of his first wife, she has little use for Clara. But Anderson is less interested in resolving the conflict between Eleanor and Clara, or in advancing the relationship of Clara and a young squatter she meets in the woods, than she is in exploring the isolation and selfishness required by the artistic life and considering whether it's worth it.

Wallace and Clara, though lustily co-dependent, have chosen a life of seclusion and of words; their standard greeting, as they pass between solitary stints of work, is "Lucky." Yet it is acknowledged in their first conversation, about a student's poem, that the act of creation and "an awareness of death" go hand in hand. Later Clara, watching a hawk capture a mouse, muses of the mouse, "How would it be to live like that? Without fear up to the moment you sensed the shadow of the wing?" For Wallace and Clara, the shadow of the wing is more or less a constant canopy. It takes the form of his illness, the inherited instability that fuels her gift but also leads to recurring bouts of madness and institutionalization, and the sullen, resentful ghost of the dead child Wallace ignored when he was alive. In Amanda Dehnert's deceptively simple Trinity Rep staging, death is an upstage door through which characters retire almost casually. Transitions are marked by the wordless, exacting rearrangement of chairs.

Given the roughhewn bare bones of Jenkins's set and the more polished ones of Anderson's writing, it falls to the actors to supply flesh. The New England Sonata, though often tartly funny, is an austere work. Some of its nature symbolism is heavy-handed, and I'm not sure what to make of Pip, the Dickens-monikered stoner hovering in Wallace and Clara's woods, waiting to encroach on their life. But at Trinity, the play's paradoxically formal and disjointed structure is strengthened by performances built not on meditative themes but on real life. One-time Trinity regular Amy Van Nostrand (who, like Dr. Syd Hanson, has returned to Providence from Tinseltown) brings a soupçon of Dr. Vivian Bearing and a dash of Sylvia Plath to the caustic, troubled Clara, whose fierceness she frames in a sexy ease. Timothy Crowe captures both the dapper professor and the grasping, vulnerable child in Wallace. Barbara Meek brings a breezy intrusiveness, but also a core of blunt wisdom and compassion, to reluctant snowbird Eleanor. And vacancy and intensity spar believably, and amusingly, in Andy MacDonald's Pip. Anderson's New England Sonata is neither emotionally lush nor dramatically gripping. But it's well rendered here, and its weighty considerations keep playing like a tune in your head.