Back in New York’s Gilded Age of the 1870s, it was considered gauche to serve soup for luncheon, shocking for a man to touch the elbow of a young woman in public and an outright scandal for a wife to walk out on her husband and attempt to re-enter society.
Maintaining that era’s strict social mores is central to Edith Wharton’s 1920 novel “The Age of Innocence.” More than 100 years later, these restrictive rules may sound laughable. But has anything really changed? Just ask a member of today’s Gen Z set about the rules of etiquette surrounding iPhone communication (always text before ever before attempting a call, and never — absolutely never — leave a voicemail).
The rules we humans place upon ourselves to live together peaceably have always interested Karen Zacarías, who lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband and three children.
Playwright Karen Zacarías.
(Courtesy of the Old Globe)
After earning an international relations degree from Stanford University in 1991, she worked in the field of Latin American policy before jumping ship to become a now-celebrated playwright. Her works include “Native Gardens” and “Destiny of Desire,” which were both presented at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre in recent years.
Now, Zacarías is back at the Globe with her world premiere play adaptation of “The Age of Innocence,” directed by Chay Yew. The play will open in previews on Thursday.
Zacarías said the play took 11 years to go from concept to completion because it took her that long to figure out “how to adapt an unadaptable novel.”
“It takes a really rigorous process to make sure the language feels of the time, but the emotional truth feels universal,” she said, in a recent phone interview from Washington, D.C. “Edith Wharton has a very strong point of view and a very sharp wit. This play is about ambiance and context.”
Old Globe artistic director Barry Edelstein said he’s excited to bring Zacarías back to San Diego, where her plays have been warmly received by local audiences.
“Karen has found a vivid theatrical language for Edith Wharton’s moving and strikingly modern-feeling story, and the great director Chay Yew stages it with energy and dynamism,” Edelstein said, in a statement. “This is the kind of material for which The Old Globe is celebrated, and I am honored to bring it to our audiences.”
“The Age of Innocence” is the story of a forbidden love triangle. Aristocratic New York lawyer Newland Archer is dutifully engaged to marry the lovely, wealthy and virginal May Welland, but he falls passionately in love with May’s cousin, the worldly Countess Ellen Olenska, who has left her husband in Poland and arrives unexpectedly in New York. Ellen’s bucking of social rules shocks everyone except the fascinated Newland, who must consider the cost of throwing convention to the wind to be with her. The book’s ironic title refers to the genteel behavior of aristocratic people who are, in reality, cynical, cruel and intolerant.
Zacarías can’t remember how old she was when she first read “The Age of Innocence,” but she remembers feeling an instant kinship with Ellen Olenska.
Zacarías was born into an intellectual family of artists and doctors in Mexico City and moved to the U.S. with her parents when she was 10 years old. Like Ellen, she had to learn all the customs of her new home country on the fly.
“The idea of being from another culture spoke tome in that way,” Zacarías said. “Ellen Olenska is a foreigner and she’s treated like an outsider who doesn’t know the rules. She’s exoticized and punished because she is supposed to know something that doesn’t make sense to her.”
Back in 2009, Zacarías wrote “The Book Club Play” which had characters reading passages aloud from different books, including “The Age of Innocence.” One of her friends wondered aloud why nobody had ever attempted to turn the novel into a play (though it was successfully adapted into a film in 1993).
So, Zacarías decided to give it a go and after penning a 200-page first draft, she figured out why “The Age of Innocence” had never been staged. Besides the fact that the novel has seemingly hundreds of characters, it’s not really about the characters themselves, but about the constructs these characters have created to make themselves miserable.
“We do need social codes. If not, there’s anarchy. But those social codes can turn on us,” she said. “The idea of being canceled has been with us for a very long time. The emotional pressure of that is in some ways both absurd and very real and it has very real consequences.”
Another challenge in turning the novel into a play was figuring out how to translate the importance of these societal rules to a contemporary audience so that they can understand what’s at stake for these characters.
Wharton, who became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction with “The Age of Innocence, was able to transmit those stakes to readers with her skillful writing. But how do you re-create that language onstage in a way that doesn’t feel old-fashioned?
The answer, Zacarías realized, was to create a narrator. She is keeping details about this character under wraps but said the narrator will “put everything in context for us. She is our guide. She’s a person who helps us be the cultural anthropologist.”
Over the years, Zacarías has become on the nation’s leading Latin-American playwrights. She was the first resident playwright at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C.; she is the founder of Young Playwrights Theater and she’s the co-founder of Latinx Theater Commons, a national network that strives to update the American narrative to include Latino stories.
Many of her plays are about Mexican folklore and history and they often tell the stories of women and immigrants. To help make the play more accessible to a wider audience, the novel’s all-White characters have been cast diversely.
Shereen Ahmed (of Broadway’s “Light in the Piazza”) leads the cast as Countess Ellen Olenska and Callum Adams (of CBS’ “Blue Bloods”) stars as attorney Newland Archer. Also featured are Delphi Borich as May (“Camelot” and “Into the Woods”); Barzin Akhavan as Beaufort (“The Kite Runner”); Eva Kaminsky (“Harry Potter and the Cursed Child”) as Narrator; Mahira Kakkar (“Life of Pi”) as Mrs. Welland and Medora Manson; and Rami Margron (The Old Globe’s “Hurricane Diane”) as Mrs. Archer and Regina Beaufort. Also featured are San Diego actors Mike Sears and Sophia Oberg, as well as Socorro Santiago and Michael Underhill.
Zacarías said her play will tell the full story of the novel, but it won’t re-create the grandeur of the homes and finery of the era.
“We don’t try to create the Gilded Age, we allow (Edith’s) language to decorate the stage,” Zacarías said.
But one thing the play will boast, as many period productions at the Old Globe are known for, is lavish costume design by Susan E. Mickey.
Zacarías said she’s excited to see the play finally come together after 11 years, three workshops and many, many rewrites. And she hopes today’s audiences will buy into Wharton’s world and identify with its characters.
“In the novel, these characters are very human and they’re contradictory. They say one thing and then do the other,” she said. “But humans are inconsistent and they’re imperfect. Who they want to be and who they are is usually at odds.”
‘The Age of Innocence’
When: Previews, Thursday through Feb. 14. Opens Feb. 15 and runs through March 10. Showtimes, 7 p.m. Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays; 8 p.m. Fridays; 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays; 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays
Where: The Old Globe Theatre, 1363 Old Globe Way, Balboa Park, San Diego
Tickets: $35-$118
Phone: (619) 234-5623
Online: theoldglobe.org