Attic drama Wellesley presents Mrs. Rochester BY IRIS FANGER
	After Mrs. Rochester By Polly Teale. Based on the life of Jean Rhys. Directed by Nora Hussey. Movement by Katie Griswold. Set and lighting by Ken Loewit. Costumes by Andrew Poleszak. With Lauren Balmer, Sarah Barton, Heather Boas, John Boller, Stephen Cooper, Alicia Kahn, Lisa Foley, Richard LaFrance, Doug Lockwood, Melina McGrew, Peter Papadopoulos, and Charlotte Peed. Presented by Wellesley Summer Theatre at Alumnae Hall, Wellesley College, through January 24.

Jean Rhys (1894-1979) followed the familiar instruction to authors — write about what you know — as the guide for a series of novels, including her most famous volume, Wide Sargasso Sea, which was published in 1966. Drawing on a lifelong fascination with the mad wife locked in the attic in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and by the fact that she and the fictional character were both born in the West Indies of Creole ancestry, Rhys imagines Bertha Mason as a wild child called Antoinette growing up into a young woman before and just after her wedding. Although she was never locked in an attic, Rhys also moved to England and lived out a life of anger at being subjugate to the wishes of the men she met, loved, and/or married, among them Ford Maddox Ford.

After Mrs. Rochester, by British playwright Polly Teale, intermingles the biography of Rhys with the imagined life of Brontë’s character in a complex, moving drama that examines the fate of women in a male-dominated society. Teale directs the English theater company Shared Experience, which specializes in highly physical stage adaptations of works of literature; she’s also written a play based on Jane Eyre. Here, however, she creates a central character divided among three actors: the mature Rhys (a role that was played by Diana Quick in the London production); the child Antoinette, who is also the child Ella (Rhys’s real name); and mad Bertha, dressed only in a 19th-century shift and rolling about on the floor of the stage. Teale has constructed the play by lifting scenes from both Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre and segueing them into a cinematic flow of action that may be disconcerting for a viewer not up on his or her reading, even though the impact of the women’s suffering needs no literary gloss.

Teale explores other themes in her many strands of the plot, particularly the neglect of the young Antoinette and Ella by their mothers. Rhys abandoned her own daughter until she was eight, a subplot that forms the framework for the play.

Wellesley Summer Theatre, which Nora Hussey founded in 1998 as a company that combines professional actors with students, has expanded to include both summer and winter productions. After Mrs. Rochester has been given a competent and thoughtful mounting directed with admirable decorum by Hussey (who also directs the Wellesley College drama program). The large ensemble of actors — many of whom play multiple roles — has been coached to keep the emotions at a simmer rather than a full boil, except for the excerpt from Jane Eyre in which Bertha attacks her husband. (There’s also a cameo appearance by the governess.) Hussey maintains clarity despite the difficult shifts in time and place as the play ricochets without orderly chronology among the West Indies childhoods of both the real and fictitious characters and their adult lives in England.

The poignant trio of women is well portrayed by Alicia Kahn as the young Antoinette/Rhys, Lisa Foley as the mature Rhys, and Melina McGrew as Bertha. Kahn, who played lead roles in previous Wellesley Summer Theatre productions of Little Moon of Alban and Anna Karenina, grows in stature at each successive viewing. She has mastered a hint of native patois that makes her stance as an outsider in England all the more believable. Foley speaks clearly as the narrator looking back on her life and obsessions. McGrew inventively handles the difficult task of remaining on stage throughout the two acts, sometimes the focus of attention, sometimes not. The male actors, particularly Doug Lockwood as Edward Rochester and Stephen Cooper as Ford, are to be commended for their swift transitions into additional parts.

With After Mrs. Rochester, Wellesley Summer Theatre takes a leap forward in accomplishment. Hussey, set and lighting designer Ken Loewit, costume designer Andrew Poleszak, and the acting company deserve plaudits for an authoritative take on this challenging work.