Popular playwright Lauren Gunderson is known for dramas about women (especially real-life historical figures, but fictional characters, too), so it was perhaps inevitable she eventually would get around to adapting for the stage the beloved American novel “Little Women.”
Imaginative as she is, it’s perhaps also inevitable that Gunderson would integrate the actual author, Louisa May Alcott, into the script along with the author’s alter ego, the tomboyish Jo.
In TheatreWorks Silicon Valley’s “Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women,” part of a rolling world premiere by several commissioning theaters, Gunderson introduces Louisa as an occasional narrator, while, in the persona of Jo, she and some other characters (based on Alcott’s own family) occasionally voice some of the novel’s narrative. Thus, some literary subtext is spoken aloud.
The show is presented on a simple but expansive, triangle-shaped set serving as the March family living room and the story’s other locales. Director Giovanna Sardelli knows nothing fancier is needed in terms of set design (which is by Annie Smart, the period costumes are by Meg Neville) for the tale to unfold in two-and-a-half well-paced hours.
Among the March girls—shy, musical, doomed-throughout-two-acts Beth (Lauren Hart); artistic, self-dramatizing youngest sister Amy (Sharon Shao); and the oldest, take-charge sister Meg (Emily Ota)—there’s Elissa Beth Stebbins, occasionally as Louisa, but mostly pitch-perfect as the tomboyish, funny, tough Jo.
When she says, “I can’t get over my disappointment at not being a boy,” you believe her. Her passion for writing, her ambition, her temper, her affection for– but decidedly unromantic feelings toward–puppy-dogish boy-next-door Laurie (played with great humor and charm by lanky, graceful Max Tachis), all ring true.
Catherine Riddley as the preternaturally warm and wise Marmee and George Psarras in two key roles round out the ideal cast.
A particular scene was more memorable for me in this stage production than it was in the beloved book: when Jo gathers every ounce of fortitude to tell Laurie she doesn’t like him “that way.” Tachis and Stebbins register such palpable awkwardness, longing and despair that the scene registers in the way that only live-stage, visceral as it is, can bring text to life.
All the familiar dialogue is here, from Jo’s lament, “Christmas won’t be Christmas without presents”—and yes, she’s lying on the rug just as Alcott wrote it—onward. Despite some slightly cloying group poses—Sardelli’s March women tend to gather in perfectly photogenic huddles—and the required (by Alcott) sentimentality, this 1868 story of a loving, occasionally quarrelsome and generous family (who, early on in the book and the play, give their Christmas breakfast away to a starving family and stoically go without) works beautifully today. With the patriarch off fighting in the Civil War and the women struggling to make ends meet and find their way in life, it has staying power.
TheatreWorks Silicon Valley’s “Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women” continues through Oct. 12 at Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro St., Mountain View. Tickets are $59-$109 at theatreworks.org.