After 75 years, Hedgerow goes back to Dreiser's 'American Tragedy'

Theodore Dreiser and Rose Valley's Hedgerow Theatre go back a long way. In 1935, the theater premiered a stage adaptation of Dreiser's

An American Tragedy

with Dreiser's full approval. Seventy-five years later, Hedgerow artistic director Penelope Reed and actor Louis Lippa use that adaptation, by Maria Ley-Piscator, as the jumping-off point for their own new version, with much success.

Dreiser's 1925 novel is often cited as one of the 20th century's most important, and indeed, with its themes of labor, industry, love, social climbing, and scandal, it was one of the first to examine the underside of the then-burgeoning new American dream. Reed and Lippa play with the story's classical roots, employing a Greek chorus of narrators - Lippa, Zoran Kovcic, and Alana Gerlach - to move young Clyde Griffiths (Carl Smith) along toward his inexorable fate.

Griffiths is the resentful son of itinerant ministers, hired by a wealthy uncle, and soon faced with a life-altering decision: marry his pregnant factory-worker girlfriend Roberta or chase after Sondra, a wealthy daughter of privilege who has recently shown him considerable favor. It wouldn't be a tragedy if he didn't make the wrong decision and then go about executing it in a spectacularly ill-considered manner.

Smith is an excellent illustrator of this rake's progress, with the boyish, old-fashioned features of a Norman Rockwell subject, his face steadily darkening and hardening with each twist of fortune. Erica Hawthorne's Roberta is to the earth what Meredith Beck's Sondra is to the air, though Beck gets to have much more fun as a flighty, flirty ray of glittering sunshine.

Reed, in directing, references the story's naturalism with a lack of recorded sound cues; instead, someone blows a train whistle or mimics a bird call (actually, that bird call is a bit much; it's too complex, repeated too often, and at the show I saw, evoked snickers during the show's climactic scene). Kovcic's set, all black and minimal, with just a bench and stools for props, brings a modernist sensibility and a stark backdrop against which Dreiser's characters play out their complex psychological motivations and machinations.

Hedgerow's production is a great fit for students and families, but not just because it's a collaboration by the theater, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Wharton Esherick Museum (woodworker/artist Esherick, subject of a current exhibition and a forthcoming symposium, was a great friend of Dreiser's), or because it works nicely as a cautionary tale. It's straightforward with its source material, but with contemporary staging that won't feel musty to those allergic to anything premillennial.