Reader . . . Jane Eyre at Wellesley BY STEVE VINEBERG
	Jane Eyre By Polly Teale. Based on the novel by Charlotte Brontë. Directed by Nora Hussey. Set and lighting designed by Ken Loewit. Costumes by Andrew Poleszak. With Alicia Kahn, Kortney Adams, Derek Stone Nelson, and John Boller. At the Wellesley Summer Theatre, in repertory with Teale’s After Mrs. Rochester, through June 26.

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is one of the true oddities of the Victorian age. The title character, an orphan thrown by an uncongenial aunt into a wretched institution, winds up in her late teens as governess to the ward of a singular, stormy man. Edward Rochester falls in love with Jane, but he’s still haunted by the specter of his first wife — who, it turns out, went mad but is still in the house, locked in the attic and watched over by a servant who keeps her tendencies toward destruction and self-destruction in check. It’s a Gothic with a heroine whose contradictions Brontë couldn’t seem to work through: she’s mousy and self-effacing yet boldly honest and somewhat perverse. She loves Rochester, but she won’t accept him as a lover until, returning to him at the end, she finds him blind and crippled. The book isn’t written on the surface as if it were Jane’s wormy triumph over the world that has mistreated her, but you don’t have to delve very far to see it that way. I actually prefer the Daphne du Maurier version, Rebecca, where the poor, orphaned heroine grows to adulthood by taking on the troubles of her aristocratic husband.

It isn’t clear what a dramatist is supposed to do with this material, which is simultaneously masochistic and vengeful. You could just play it straight, on the basic narrative level, which works fairly well for the 1944 Hollywood movie, with Joan Fontaine as Jane and Orson Welles as Rochester. Polly Teale’s version, which is playing in rep at the Wellesley Summer Theatre (with After Mrs. Rochester, her adaptation of the Jean Rhys prequel Wide Sargasso Sea), attempts to reconcile the contradictions in the text — and to construct a feminist reading of the novel — by reimagining Bertha, the madwoman in the attic (a now familiar trope in feminist literary theory), as Jane’s alter ego. In the childhood scenes, Jane (Alicia Kahn) and Bertha (Kortney Adams) are paired, and when Jane’s Aunt Reed (Gladdy Matteoisian) locks her in a dark room as a punishment, Bertha mouths the protests of terrified Jane. And she remains on stage throughout the performance, locked up until Rochester (Derek Stone Nelson) courts Jane — at which point Bertha emerges from the attic and makes a third in their lovemaking. This is one of those dramatic ideas that doesn’t stand close scrutiny. In what way, precisely, could Bertha represent a hidden part of Jane Eyre? She’s morally and emotionally exacting, not driven by passion. It’s one thing to suggest that the madwoman in the attic represents the side of women Victorian men (or modern ones) fear and want to lock away. But both major male characters in the story — the other is St. John Rivers (John Boller), the clergyman who rescues Jane when she runs away from Rochester — worship the ground the governess walks on; neither seems to want to silence any part of her.

The best thing about Nora Hussey’s production is the way Ken Loewit has lit his own spare, effective set. He uses the limited space evocatively, and the early images in particular are quite beautiful Appia-like abstractions. The cast is strongest in some of the smaller roles: Charlotte Peed as Mrs. Fairfax, the kindly housekeeper, Heather Boas and Claire Shinkman as Rivers’s sisters (and Boas as Jane’s only friend at the orphanage, Helen Burns). The principal actors aren’t bad, but their performances tend to be more elocutionary than dramatic, so the big scenes sound like literary readings. Partly that’s the fault of the adaptation, which is in love with Brontë’s diction and doesn’t dramatize the story enough. And Hussey has made some choices that exacerbate that problem. You simply can’t get away with including two moments (one in each act) where all the action stops cold while the protagonist changes her costume in full view of the audience. And the staging is rather flat. This Jane Eyre feels too much like a throwback to readers’ theater.