Bertumen (Meg) and Isabella Star LaBlanc (Louisa/Jo) in “Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women” at the Guthrie Theater. (photo courtesy of Dan Norman)
When I saw that “Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women,” currently being performed at the Guthrie Theater, is a “new adaptation” of Alcott’s 1868 novel, I was both intrigued and wary.
The playwright is Lauren Gunderson; I have read two of Gunderson’s previous plays, both part of the “Christmas at Pemberley” series. I was not a fan of those because Gunderson and her co-author, Margot Melcon, completely revamped the voices and personalities of Jane Austen’s beloved “Pride and Prejudice” characters. So it is safe to say I was uneasy about this book-to-play, too.
But I was pleasantly surprised when the story started with not Jo, not Meg, not Beth nor Amy or Marmee, but Alcott herself. Fans of the book know that the plot surrounds four sisters who are based on Alcott and her own sisters. Gunderson put the book’s author into the play, rather than just telling the story outright.
This was a fun choice because it allowed viewers to get a sense of what the story was based on and how the novel came to be so popular. I was thankful, though, that Alcott was only in about three scenes; she does not take up the entire show, which I believe would have taken away from the heartwarming “Little Women” plot. Alcott is also played by the same actress that plays Jo, a character based on the author.
Besides Alcott’s presence, the story doesn’t change. Lifelong fans of “Little Women,” as well as newcomers to the story, will fall hard into the joy, sorrow, playfulness and whimsy that the March sisters possess, just as one would reading the novel.
In some respects, these emotions come out even stronger on stage than they do on the page. In Gunderson’s adaptation, there is no narrator. However, actors say things like, “Jo thought that…” speaking thoughts and feelings aloud to move the plot along while keeping Alcott’s original wording.
Actors also look directly at the audience at times, further showing the emotions playing across their face — displaying what they are thinking in addition to what viewers can see them doing.
The actors are delightful; working with a minimal set, they must perform scenes that cannot be shown literally. When one character falls to the floor, shrieking, she is actually falling through a crack in the ice. At one point, viewers are even in two places at once. Jo is on one side of the stage, in New York, and Beth and Marmee are on the other, reading a letter Jo has sent them while sitting on the living room couch of their home.
The dialogue follows the same pattern as the narration; it doesn’t stray much from Alcott’s novel, though some scenes, like the Pickwick Club and the pickled limes fiasco, are noticeably absent. The story is overall true to the book, and the actors perform it beautifully, even with a few instances where the dialogue changes for comedic timing.
These differences are a delight rather than an annoyance. The show is funny and playful, and I attribute that most to the one-liners that pop up when least expected. I liked Jo’s “Wait, what?” line when she finds out who her best friend is engaged to. If that were a phrase in 1860s Massachusetts, Jo March would certainly have used it.
The quips and quirks of this play bring a comedy and joy that can’t quite be read in the pages of the novel while still enriching viewers with the original story’s content just as sweetly as the book did.
“Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women” will play at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis until June 21.
Bridget Schmid can be reached at schm1520@stthomas.edu.
