Turn Virginia Woolf's 1927 novel To the Lighthouse into a theater piece? My first thought, NO WAY. Each of the book's three sections is written in a different style, and as with most of Ms. Woolf's writing, the story line is slim, the main emphasis on inner states, thoughts, sensory impressions. Still, I was anxious to see how Adele Eding Shank dealt with the problem. She represents each section of the book by a different theatrical style: the first a fairly straightforward narrative (interspersed with an on-stage string quartet), though the actors often speak their inner thoughts directly to the audience; the second run as a pastiche of slide show, stage action without dialog and light show, the string quartet driving the whole: the third as a Philip-Glass-like opera. General consensus has been that the dinner scene in Act I worked best--with 9 dinner guests miming conversation while speaking their inner thoughts about the gathering and each of the other guests. By contrast, the concluding intentionally discordant faux opera, was often marked by downright bad singing, surely the low point of the evening. Long before that, however, before we had even reached the dinner party, the fellow sitting to my right began slow rhythmic breathing. I glanced past him to his companion, hoping she might elbow him back to consciousness. Alas she too had left us. I glanced to my left. The woman sitting there had her head on her shoulder, eyes shut. As I surveyed the rows in front of me, I noticed many nodded heads, closed eyes and slow breathing theatergoers. Surely, not a good sign, I thought, as I let my eyelids flutter down and drifted off.
Rich Yurman
