Parlor play Ice Glen and The Wharton One-Acts BY CAROLYN CLAY

LENOX — Shakespeare was in good if lesser company when Shakespeare & Company occupied Edith Wharton’s one-time estate in Lenox. When the troupe moved house in 1999, taking over a nearby 63-acre property owned by the National Music Foundation, Wharton went with them; the grand if rundown parlor of Spring Lawn manse, on the property, has proved a charming home for Dennis Krausnick’s adaptations of various Wharton works, from her early (and voluminous) novel The Valley of Decision to double bills of short stories separated by tea and cookies consumed overlooking the grounds. All that will come to an end after this summer, since S&C has sold Spring Lawn and 30 acres to resort operator James Jurney Sr., whose relations will turn it into a luxury inn. The transaction will probably save Tina Packer’s feisty brigade from financial ruin; upkeep of the property and its decrepit buildings has proved staggering. And the company will continue to produce Shakespeare and others in its Founders’ Theatre while pursuing its campaign to reproduce the Rose Theatre, home to Shakespeare’s earliest works, on its remaining grounds. But what makes the impending loss of Spring Lawn more piquant is that the Wharton-related pieces on view there this summer are worth the whistle.

Wharton figures only peripherally in Joan Ackermann’s conflicted valentine to the Berkshires, Ice Glen (in repertory through September 4), as an off-stage broker of literary talent. The work, however, treats of matters of interest to artists and audiences alike: who owns talent, and is it permissible to hoard it? Even Emily Dickinson, though she never went on a book tour, conceded to publication. The play also addresses the question, on the table at least since As You Like It, whether living in the country engenders nobility or dullness.

The play, which is being given its joint premiere by Shakespeare & Company (for which it was written) and Florida Stage, is set in 1920 at a decaying Lenox manse called Stonegate, a tarnished relic of the Gilded Age much like Spring Lawn. Ackermann, who lives in the Berkshires, imagines a situation in which mistress and long-time retainers live in barely hierarchical, squalid harmony under a large portrait of the master of the house, whose death two years earlier brought isolation and hard times. (Turns out he was an overgenerous if sainted soul who gave away much of his wife’s fortune.) Also in residence is Sarah Harding, a divorced wild child of a poet who is neither a poor aristocrat like the lady of the house, Dulce Bainbridge, nor a servant. Sarah keeps the gardens and maintains soulful if dangerous communication with a bear that, unlike the one in The Winter’s Tale, remains unseen. It is her poems that neighbor Wharton has sent to an editor of the Atlantic Monthly, who shows up eager to publish them.

We never hear Sarah’s poems, one of which invokes the Stockbridge locale of the play’s title, a crevice of rock in which ice, though hot to the touch, remains frozen all year. To judge by editor Peter Woodburn’s assessment and description, she’s a female Ted Hughes, without all the brooding virility and adultery, writing violent, rugged paeans to Nature. But unlike Hughes, she has no interest in seeing her name in lights — or in the Atlantic. When the literarily impassioned Woodburn arrives with the good news and a check, she’ll have nothing to do with him. Indeed, she considers the fact that three of her poems have entered his mind a violation tantamount to his having snooped in her underwear drawer. As director Packer puts it in a program note: "And how does an artist, who is revealing the most personal part of her- or himself, find the courage to let it go before the public?"

But far from being a spare consideration of artistic responsibility, Ice Glen is stuffed with period Berkshireana, from speculations on Nature and its effects on human (not to mention bruin) intercourse to its depiction of Stonegate’s makeshift family of mistress, poet, and servants, who include a wise butler, an opinionated old cook, and Denby, a slow-witted but craftily perverse orphan handyman parented by all. Woodburn is the citified catalyst who sets up seismic shifts in the folksy familial dynamic as he agitatedly pursues his poet, at one point misdirecting his passion in such a way that it breaks through more than one dam of hot ice.

Ackermann, who adapted her Off the Map for a 2003 film by Campbell Scott, has written an interesting but hardly compelling play. Composed in 12 short scenes that run from October to December and at S&C involve the elaborate piecing and unpiecing of a table, the work seems fragmented, its characters (with the exception of the impish Denby, with his plot to milk the family dog) more convenient than original. Dulce, played with a sort of dazed charm by Elizabeth Aspenlieder, is particularly inconsistent: sensual but simple, she develops a sharp tongue and a backbone overnight. Kristin Wold brings a fiery yet sweet determination to the eccentric poet, and the dependable Michael Hammond is sensitively insensitive editor Woodburn. Gillian Seidl plays sturdy servant Mrs. Roswell just as director Packer would — with hamboning warmth that’s both cliché’d and comforting.

This season’s Wharton One-Acts (in repertory through September 4) proves an exceptional vintage, primarily because both short works are two-handers played by the S&C team of Jason Asprey and Corinna May. She recently returned to the company following an 18-month stint in the national tour of The Graduate, during which she traded in her Wharton-era lace and corsets to be in-the-buff understudy to five Mrs. Robinsons.

In the sly The Mission of Jane, Asprey and May play Julian and Alice Lethbury, a disaffected if wealthy couple of old New York flashing forward through some 15 years just after the turn of the 20th century. The scenes are set in the dining room, where a servant bustles in and out, serving over the course of the decade and a half an elaborate meal from soup to brandy. In the opening scene, Alice, an unimaginative woman whose conversation consists of paint-by-numbers maxims, announces her resolve to adopt a baby whose mother has died at the hospital where she does charity work. The condescending Julian, though less than keen ("A human baby?" he inquires), won’t stand in her way.

As years pass, it becomes clear that "the mission of Jane," whether she knows it or not, is to bring her disparate parents closer as they try to survive her independent, "inexorable" ways. Krausnick’s wry adaptation, which includes not only dialogue but monologues in which each Lethbury confides in the audience, conveys the happy unfreezing of their mismatch and affords their increasingly conspiratorial effort to rid themselves of Jane by an appropriate marriage an amusing — even triumphant — buoyancy.

After the cookies, the pair return in the Paris-set The Promise, which Krausnick adapted from Wharton’s short story "Les Metteurs en Scène." For 10 years, American Blanche Lambert and Frenchman Jean Le Fanois, both polished but poor, have been informal partners in a business that unites rich but insufficiently pedigreed Americans with impoverished French nobles, the trickle-down keeping the matchmakers in relative luxury. Blanche is shepherding a loaded American widow and her young daughter; Jean has connections to a "title without price." It’s clear, however, that these two, who will eventually get too old for their game, have eyes for each other.

The Promise has a great O. Henry–esque ending, but it’s marred by Asprey’s cheesy French accent and by the awkwardness of jamming exposition into conversation: the two keep telling each other the history of their situation and their relationship for our benefit. Nonetheless, the piece is well-acted, its artifice cut by poignancy, and the hour and 40 minutes proves as delicious as the intermission cookies. The Wharton parlor once removed will be missed.