Word: sloper
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...When I am here with Father, it seems that no one would want to listen to me." This painful admission slips from the lips of Catherine Sloper, the almost preternaturally shy heroine of The Heiress, currently playing at Boston's Lyric Stage. Catherine feels this way for good reason. Her father, Dr. Austin Sloper, is your basic 19th-century Frigidaire, almost biologically incapable of emotion except when criticizing his daughter or remembering the wife who died giving birth...
...Sloper aside, though, over a century of readers and viewers have wanted to listen to Catherine. Washington Square, the Henry James novella from which the story derives, was one of the author's earliest successes, and Agnieszka Holland's recent film adaptation, still playing at Kendall Square Cinema, opened last month to much critical acclaim...
...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...
...Austin Sloper, a prominent New York doctor, first enters after a day spent delivering someone's child. His solicitous care of other families stands in cruel ironic contrast to the distant, detached husk he becomes in his own household. His daughter, by contrast, exists in perpetually stunted emotional tumult. In her first line, she seeks approval from her aunt Lavinia (Eve Johnson), holding the skirt of her new dress, nervously asking, "Do you like the color...
...inevitably disparaged by a father who asserts that "You are good for nothing unless you are clever." Catherine has so internalized his belief in her inadequacies that she insists to her aunt she never thinks of love or marriage. You know what that means. Into the Sloper brownstone swoops Morris Townsend (Diego Arciniegas), a distant cousin-of-a-cousin just returned from some months in Europe. Translation: he is dashing, lively, vaguely exotic, and unpreoccupied with the social stringencies of Old New York...