‘The Age of Innocence’ at Arena Stage
By • March 13, 2025 0 72
Even if you haven’t read the novel, you’ve probably seen Martin Scorsese’s exquisite and respectful 1993 film, starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer and Winona Ryder.
Need I say more? Now playing at Arena Stage: “The Age of Innocence” (violins up).
Edith Wharton’s Rosetta Stone of the upper-class New York milieu of her youth — among Joneses (her father’s side), Rhinelanders (her mother’s), Rensselaers, Schermerhorns and Astors — first appeared in four issues of the women’s magazine Pictorial Review in 1920.
Did Wharton set out unsure how the story would end, as Charles Dickens is said to have done? She wittily narrates her ironically titled tale, but the suspense that builds is no joke. Will Newland Archer and Ellen Olenska consummate their forbidden love? The dagger that [character’s name withheld] plunges in chapter 33 (of 34) is sharp. “‘Ah — ’ said Archer, his heart stopping.” Some readers’ hearts may stop too.
The current production, running through March 30, mounts an adaptation by D.C.-based playwright Karen Zacarías developed at San Diego’s Old Globe, where it was produced in February and March of 2024, directed by Chay Yew.
At Arena, it is the first show directed by Artistic Director Hana S. Sharif on the Fichandler Stage, the oldest and largest — seating 680 “arena style,” meaning in the round — of the three theaters in what is now the Mead Center.
The play opens, as does the novel, during a performance of “Faust” in the early 1870s at New York’s Academy of Music on East 14th Street, the “old money” opera house, overtaken in the 1880s by the “new money” Metropolitan. Opera “boxes” roll out from the corners of the Fichandler; we look up at the actors seated in them, who look down at the actors portraying the singers on the small square platform below.
Before long, admiring his fiancée May Welland in the Mingott family’s box, protagonist Newland Archer, played by A.J. Shively, spots May’s long-absent cousin Ellen, known as Countess Olenska as the wife of abusive Polish Count Olenski, from whom she has scandalously fled.
“Our attention is first drawn to a performance to signify that, in some way and always, everyone is or should be performing,” writes Production Dramaturg Otis Ramsey-Zöe in a program note. “If we all are always performing then, presumably, we are always subject to an audience’s gaze. Said another way, the whole of society functions as a gilded stage.”
The conjunction of gilded stage, gilded cage and Gilded Age (many believe we are living in the second such era) is key. “A Bird in a Gilded Cage” was a Tin Pan Alley hit of 1900. The puzzle of “The Age of Innocence” is: Who is the bird?
Both May (Ryder in the film) and Ellen (Pfeiffer) are played by the same actors as in San Diego, and both are excellent.
Shereen Ahmed (Countess Olenska) and Delphi Borich (May Welland) in the current Arena Stage production of Edith Wharton’s “The Age of Innocence.” Photo by Daniel Rader.
As May, Delphi Borich conveys unquestioning adherence to the code of the Manhattan aristocracy without seeming stuck-up or shallow, politely countering Newland’s rising impatience with it: “We can’t behave like people in novels, can we?”
Shereen Ahmed rises to the challenge of portraying as complex a character as Wharton, and few others, ever conceived, gradually revealing Ellen’s depth. (And, yes, she is Newland’s femme fatale, but does she need to be everyone’s? When she came out in the red gown — designed, like all the fabulous costumes, by Fabio Toblini — it felt like that scene in “The Matrix.”)
Condensing a long, thickly narrated book into a three-hour play, plus intermission, is a tall order. Some locales were omitted, but in addition to the Academy of Music, Grace Church (scene of Newland’s wedding to May, staged with House of Horrors lighting and sound effects) and several rooms in New York (the furnishings of which rise and fall on the central platform), we visit St. Augustine, Newport, Boston and Paris.
The only character I missed was Monsieur Rivière, the tutor in London that Newland bonds with intellectually and the normally charitable May scorns. In his interaction with Rivière in the novel, we see a side of Newland that makes him more sympathetic.
Rather than jettison the book’s delightfully snide narration, Zacarías made use of a narrator, who patrols the set, at times triggering laughter and applause with Wharton’s bons mots.
The neat trick in Sharif’s treatment was to have the same actor play the narrator and Catherine Mingott, Queen Bee grandmother of May and Ellen: Felicia Curry, known locally as the host of WETA Arts. Curry handles the segues beautifully, but her normal body mass takes some getting used to. To portray Granny Mingott on her upholstered throne onscreen, Miriam Margolyes, who won Britain’s BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role, was heavily padded up.
Here is Wharton’s indelible description: “A flight of smooth double chins led down to the dizzy depths of a still-snowy bosom veiled in snowy muslins that were held in place by a miniature portrait of the late Mr. Mingott; and around and below, wave after wave of black silk surged away over the edges of a capacious armchair, with two tiny white hands poised like gulls on the surface of the billows.”
Several cameos add comic relief to the Arena production: Paolo Montalban (who also plays charismatic, scheming banker Julius Beaufort) as Henry van der Luyden; Anna Theoni DiGiovanni (also Newland’s cigarette-sneaking sister Janey) as Nastasia, Ellen’s “swarthy foreign-looking maid, with a prominent bosom under a gay neckerchief”; and, especially, Lise Bruneau (also Louisa van der Luyden), who as Ellen’s kooky aunt Medora Manson seems to have escaped from a production of “Hello, Dolly!”
Toblini and wig and hair designer Tommy Kurzman have made every scene a visual bouquet. The deftly minimalist sets were designed by Tim Mackabee. Used creatively to underscore and stop the action — signaling Newland’s emotional trauma, for instance — are the lighting, by Xavier Pierce, and the original music and sound, by Charles Coes and Nathan A. Roberts.
The Age of Innocence
Through March 30
Arena Stage, 1101 Sixth St. SW
