I think the Goetzes just did a great job at understanding everything that was theatrical both in terms of great characters and great dramatic events. The stage deals with big characters and big emotions - but here they manage, because the characters are so well observed, they manage to be very stage-worthy characters. Often what happens is that you can have a great novel, but how often is the translation from the novel to the play a failure? Those attempts fail because the novel, by its form, allows you to spend a lot of the time in the minutia of life. He really got so much so right so early on. I think he's one of those people who profoundly understood human psychology. Moisés Kaufman said he stepped up to the plate to direct The Heiress because he's "a huge fan of Henry James. Photo Archive: Audra McDonald, Celia Keenan-Bolger, Daniel Reichard, Ari Graynor, Steve Kazee and Constantine Maroulis Celebrate Murder Ballad' Returning to the drawing board, they retitled the piece The Heiress and sharpened the focus on a rich daughter denied love until money becomes an issue. They used the Henry James title when they tried it out in Boston, with a happy ending that had been forced on them by their producer, and it flopped profoundly. Instead, his brother Henry got his 1880 novel out of it, "Washington Square," and, posthumously, that became his one commercial success when Ruth and Augustus Goetz carved a classic play out of it. Phew!Īll this, with its Oedipal overlap and sexual starvation, would have made a suitable case for treatment for psychologist William James at the time. Her father, a prominent physician in New York of the mid-1800s, privately holds her responsible for his wife's death but disguises that with an overly protective, even oppressive sense of "love." This - and the threat of disinheritance - keep suitors at arm's length till one dazzled and determined worthy, Morris Townsend, slips through the ranks in two weeks' time and extracts a promise of marriage moments after the two agree to go on a first-name basis. The late mistress of the manor there, who died giving birth to Catherine, pervades the place where Catherine grew up, unloved, embroidering her way into premature spinsterhood. 1) at the Walter Kerr Theatre.Ĭhastain, a Hollywood Cinderella stretching herself to an awesome stage challenge, is gamely going for broke in her Broadway debut, following four other formidable ladies down The Great White Way (Wendy Hiller, Margaret Phillips, Jane Alexander and the Tony-winning Cherry Jones) in the role of Catherine Sloper of 16 Washington Square, a part consisting almost entirely of primal cries of the heart. She is The Heiress, freshly arrived (Nov. It's not so much a curtsey as it is a wilt, this thing Jessica Chastain does in the company of strangers - a wallflower struggling to blossom and falling painfully shy of the mark. Jessica Chastain guests Liv Ullmann, Jordan Roth, Gia Carides and Anthony LaPaglia
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