'Alison's House' at Tufts

"Well, they reached rock bottom last week," my date astutely commented Tuesday night as we left the Tufts Arena Theater. And right she was, both in the statement itself and in its implication that Tufts has taken the first tentative step back toward respectability with the production this week of Alison's House by Susan Glaspell.

Although Emily Dickinson lived, in the words of Conrad Aiken, "a life perfectly devoid of outward event," there was one great mystery about her. To an even greater degree than was common among New England mystics, she was a recluse. This, according to the most popular, though by no means only, theory, was due to an early, unsuccessful love affair with a married man. Alison's House is based on this interpretation of Miss Dickinson's life, despite the fact that Alison Stanhope, the Emily Dickinson of the play, has been dead eighteen years by the time the play takes place. This is December 31, 1899. "The last day of Alison's century," as one of the characters helpfully points out. The Stanhope family is leaving its old home on the banks of the Mississippi for a new one in the city. A reporter from Chicago comes down to see the room in which Alison worked, and off we go. Old Aunt Agatha, Alison's constant companion, now grown senile, tries unsuccessfully to burn down the house. Elsa Stanhope who, years before, ran off with a married man, returns to spend one final night in the house. Aunt Agatha dies in Elsa's arms, first giving her a packet containing many previously hidden poems of Alison's. The poems disclose all of the details of the starcrossed love affair, and the father of the family tries to burn them, to "protect my sister." But the sense and compassion of Elsa, who has suffered through the same type of romance that Alison had, saves the poems for the world. It's as banal as that. To make matters worse it has some totally unactable lines, such as one that one of the members of the family utters as he reads the new poems, Eben (low, and in beautiful excitement), "Why that bird sang thirty years ago--and sings now." Despite all this, Alison's House won the Pulitzer Prize in 1931. The original production must have been awfully good. As for the present production, the punishment fits the crime.

Once again, most of the blame can be deposited on the front lawn of director Frank B. Hanson. Tufts has an extremely unusual stage. The audience completely surrounds the stage area, sort of in the style of a diminished Yale Bowl. Further, there are very few rows of seats, so nowhere are you more than a few feet from the actors. As the large majority of modern plays are written for the proscenium stage, or the room with three walls, as someone once called it, there are distinct problems of staging at Tufts. One of the most obvious of these is how to point your actors. On the proscenium stage there is no problem, you point them toward the audience. When the audience is on all sides though, one would think that this solution could not be used. Mr. Hanson did it though, at one point producing a circle of seven people all facing outwards, like the bull moose protecting the herd from the foraging wolves. At other times actors turned fully around for no better reason than that they were about to make an important speech. Another problem with the four sided arena stage is that the audience is brought not only physically but also emotionally very near to the characters. This is well and good when the desired effect is close identification with one or two characters, but when there are a large number of almost equally important people moving around the effect is divisive. It is perhaps significant that in its most satisfactory job this year, Jack, by Ionesco, Tufts changed the setting from a dingy room to a circus. This setting placed the audience in a reasonable relationship to the players. Further, the action of the play focuses almost exclusively on Jack.

Though hindered by a further directorial failing on the part of Mr. Hanson, an inability or unwillingness to eliminate exaggerated poses and gestures, the actors were generally only slightly less than adequate. Frederick Blais as the father, and head of the Stanhope family, suffered most from this failing and played his part on too high a level from the beginning. This left him no room for growth of emotional intensity in the final scene, where he finally resorted to uncontrolled hysteria. Richard Knowles as the reporter managed by his tone and facial expressions to disguise the fact that the reporter is not a slimy busybody but a spiritual successor to Alison. Probably the best performance of the evening was given by Karen Johnson in the role of the wayward daughter. If Miss Johnson ever learns to use her face and voice as expressively as she can use her body, she will indeed be a great actress.