Containment and release

Aberdeen News reports the performances of Elinor Jones's A Voice of My Own (more information in this old posts of ours) in the South Dakota AACTFest '07:

"A Voice of My Own," the first play presented Saturday at the Capitol Theatre, is a musical look at the development of women's literature.

The play, presented by Brookings Community Theatre, was the initial presentation of South Dakota AACTFest '07. The longer name for the event is South Dakota's 2007 American Association of Community Theatre Festival.

Five performers and a pianist - all females - presented "A Voice of My Own," which was written by Elinor Jones.

The play chronicles the efforts of women to express their voices in print. Because it also looks at the broader picture, it reminds us of all of the obstacles faced by women throughout history. (...)

A story about the Bronte sisters shows the difficulties faced by women writers. The poet laureate of England, responding to a submission of poetry from Charlotte Bronte, wrote that "Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life." It turns out that he was wrong. (Jeff Bahr)

And The Acting Company performances of Polly Teale's Jane Eyre are the object of this extensive article in Chronogram Magazine:

(...) “When you’re adapting a piece of literature that has a grand novelistic scope,” he said, “you have to be creative in using the vocabulary of live theater.”
The recreation of Thornfield Hall, Rochester’s menacing home, was downsized for the stage. Not only does this help the show escape horror-film clichés, but the minimalist set allows for easy striking, an important consideration since this company is likely to perform five times per week in different venues.
Like the novel, Teale’s play lumbers under the burden of hand-wringing amid dark, stormy nights. “There is something operatic about the emotional life of Jane Eyre that is thrilling to me,” McCallum says. However, he skirts the tempting edges of wretched excess, opting for a cool, abstract modernity. For instance, the scenery is “more psychological and more theatrical and less realistic.” An over-sized lightbox showcases the forbidding sky of a Corot painting. A cellist, the play’s lone musician, offers interludes that echo the ever-present woe.

“I don’t think there’s a whiff of camp in the production,” McCallum says. “We steered clear of that trap.”
Ominously, a huge matte-gray box is wheeled back and forth throughout the production. It symbolizes not only the attic, which contains a dire mystery, but also Eyre’s psychological imprisonment. The mistreated governess, McCallum said, clearly wrestled with her own out-sized passions and struggled against the corset of social convention.
McCallum’s decidedly feminist take on the story springs from a landmark 1979 book of literary criticism, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination.
“Inside Jane Eyre is a woman—another woman, passionate and wild—so she has to keep her locked up inside,” McCallum suggests. But he also feels in the story Eyre’s renegade persona finally, triumphantly emerges. “I see Jane Eyre as a story of containment and release,” he says.

The Acting Company performs “Jane Eyre” on April 18 at 7pm at the Sosnoff Theater at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson. (845) 758-7900. (Jay Blotcher)

Picture: Carie Kawa (top) and Hannah Cabell star in “Jane Eyre” (Source)

Categories: Jane Eyre, Theatre