Look Homeward, Angel

Look Homeward, Angel By Ketti Frings, based on the novel by Thomas Wolfe Directed by Benard Cummings Southern Methodist University, Dallas, 3-7 December 2014. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The production of Ketti Frings's 1958 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Look Homeward, Angel, a dramatic adaptation of Thomas Wolfe's 1929 novel, fulfilled what one has come to expect of drama from Southern Methodist University's theatre department: beautiful, innovative sets, color-blind casting, excellent acting, and fidelity to the dramatist's text. I saw the matinee performance on 6 December 2014, at the end of the play's limited run in the large Greer Garson Theatre at SMU's commodious Owen Arts Center. The theatre is a beautiful venue with a professional-level box office, a spacious lobby with padded benches, and in-the-wall display cases containing artifacts from Garson's professional life. Designed by architect Milton Powell and opened in 1992, the theatre was a $10 million gift of the actress, wife of E. E. "Buddy" Fogelson, attorney, oilman, rancher, and philanthropist. With a classical thrust stage, a circular configuration, numerous entrances to the stage through several aisles, and seats for at least 375, the theatre was modeled on the Stratford Festival Theatre in Ontario, the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, and the Chichester Festival Theatre in England (Anderson). The audience sits in several sections of steeply raked seats facing a large stage that easily accommodates sets of any size. For Look Homeward, Angel, Russell Parkman designed a flexible set depicting the front of Eliza Gant's multistory boardinghouse that changed into W.O.'s stonecutting shop, which was hidden behind Dixieland's front facade. The set also opened up to reveal a bed that slid forward and was then retracted for Ben's illness and death scenes. The bed was also used for Eugene's tryst with Laura James. The bedroom scenes represent the only indoor spaces that were depicted. Other action that would have incurred indoors took place in the downstage porch area. Characters entered the set and departed both from the wings and from aisles in the sections of audience seats. The set was visible from the audience at all times; no curtain was used in the thrust stage. The facade of the house seemed to be composed of brown wood, not the yellowish clapboard of the Asheville reality. The set described in the text of the play calls for a "flimsily constructed frame house ... painted a dirty yellow" (5), and the set did suggest age and decay. Directed by Benard Cummings, SMU professor and New York actor, director, and playwright, the production accurately presented salient and memorable incidents from the last part of Wolfe's novel, capturing the spirit of the entire work in the process. The play showed the flirtations among the boarders; the Gant family's chaotic relationships; the raucous homecomings of the drunken patriarch, who is managed by his daughter Helen; and Eliza's real estate obsession, her lecture on "the value of a dollar" and charge of filial "Ingratitude" (Wolfe 432-33), and her insistence that lights be turned off to save money. It also portrayed Madam Elizabeth's visit to the Gant's shop; the Laura James episode; Ben's illness and death; and Eugene's departure from Altamont after speaking to the ghost of Ben. Inexplicably, Frings departs from Wolfe's text when Elizabeth wants to buy Gant's favorite Carrara angel for the grave of one of her prostitutes, her "best girl" (Wolfe, 265). In the novel, Gant reluctantly sells Elizabeth the statue, whereas, in the play, Eugene persuades her to buy a stone lamb instead, as his father supposedly wants the angel for his own grave. Other departures from the novel include Eugene's marriage proposal to Laura and his plan to elope with her, as well as Eliza's discovery of their intimate relationship and her consequent brazen confrontation of Laura, who leaves Eugene a note instead of writing him a letter from Richmond (the play necessarily had to truncate time and action to have Laura tell the disapproving Eliza that she is engaged to be married and thus will not pursue Eugene). …