Word: heiress
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Heiress is more broadly embraceable than James's work, the reason may be that its authors, Ruth and Augustus Goetz, have streamlined and softened a brittle, merciless story into something like exquisite melodrama. The characters, for whom James himself had little affection, have more obvious motivations (the extreme foregrounding of Dr. Sloper's grief for his wife, for example) and higher tides of emotional exclamation ("He must love me, someone must want me," Catherine yells. "I have never had that!"). Moreover, the authors don't ignore that dictum of audience-pleasing, "Let the underdog have her day." In fact, though...
...anything, though, The Heiress has, on stage and film, struck a deeper popular nerve than more direct translations of James's story. Its 1947 Broadway debut was a rousing success, William Wyler's 1949 film adaptation won an Oscar for Olivia de Havilland, and 1994's Broadway sell-out revival won a trove of Tonys. The Lyric Stage production, directed by Polly Hogan and starring Paula Plum as Catherine and Michael Bradshaw as Dr. Sloper, deserves similar accolades...
Admittedly, the play itself is far from perfect and bears an uncomfortably confused attitude toward its heroine. Still, Something about Catherine, that "mediocre and defenseless creature," has always drawn the attention of some superlative artistic advocates. Like the Wyler film and the Broadway productions, this Heiress boasts an impeccable cast and a sensitive director who nearly overcome the flaws in the script with the sheer emotional power of their commitment to the work. As befits the story of a wallflower, the Lyric takes flawed material and makes of it something magnificent...
...what cost? Catherine's behavior in the second act proclaims a cleverness and a sharp pragmatic bent which she has signally lacked beforehand. The Heiress seems to allow Catherine redemption on the condition that she acquire intelligence and agency; like Dr. Sloper himself, the playwrights will do nothing for Catherine so long as she is plain and retiring...
Whether or not her transformation is convincing--and Plum largely carries it off--one hates to see the work as a whole adopt the values of its own object of scorn. Simply in retitling the work The Heiress, the Goetzes define Catherine's character through her financial prospects. Nor do we delight in witnessing Catherine exchange her youthful naivete for such a bitter, scaly adulthood. This sour apple doesn't fall far from Dr. Sloper's withered tree...