You don’t need to be William Shakespeare to see how the sets create the mood for “Enchanted April,” the Tony-nominated play about four disparate and dispirited British women who share an Italian villa for a month.
The romantic comedy opened Thursday at Seattle’s ACT Theatre.
Act I unfolds in dark and somber London parlors rattled by thunder as ominous as the zeppelin bombs rained on the city during World War I just a few years earlier.
Act II bursts open among the terrace’s brilliant terra cotta tiles at San Salvatore – “It sounds sacred,” one character exclaims – a medieval castle awash in sunshine and flowers that works upon its tenants like a magical elixir.
Costume designer Frances Kenny faced a subtler challenge in revealing the characters’ internal changes through their clothes.
She first cracked open her voluminous costume history books, surfed the Internet and synthesized her ideas in drawings she discussed with director Warren Shook.
Then she bought yards of rich wools, silks and velvet that ACT’s eight-person costume shop shaped into outfits first created in inexpensive muslin to allow for fittings and more revisions.
The result underscores the uplifting play’s point about the transformative power of love and nature.
Rose Arnott (Suzanne Bouchard), an unhappy housewife with a heartbreaking secret, first appears in a severe navy blue coat and hat. She sheds layers to reveal more of herself as the play unfolds; lighter dresses reflect her brightening mood and jewelry her evolving sensuality.
Lottie Wilton (Julie Briskman), who initiates the trip among strangers, soon dumps her dowdy suit and cavorts onstage barefoot in a 1920s-style bathing suit, flowers decorating her hair.
Glamorous flapper Lady Caroline Bramble (Deborah Fialkow) hides her pain in a flask of gin but flaunts her modernity along with a lot of leg in scandalously short skirts.
The imperious Mrs. Graves (Suzy Hunt), an embittered widow stuck in the past, departs England squeezed into a Victorian-era corset beneath her fussy tweeds. By the play’s luminous conclusion at a moonlit party, she has cast aside both her corset and her cane.
“They all become really liberated,” Kenny said.
Besides illuminating the narrative, Kenny said the costumer’s job is to support the actors. An unwieldy long scarf was distracting Hunt, for instance, so hours before the first preview Kenny was prowling ACT’s cavernous costume storage area for a shawl to replace it.
Details the audience probably won’t even notice, like the fact that the flapper’s fire-engine-red nail polish does not cover the whites of her nails as was the style of the day, add up to an overall authenticity that makes the characters’ changes more convincing.
“It is fundamentally about the power of transformation,” actor Briskman said of the play’s staying power.
The 1922 book by Elizabeth Von Arnim remains in print and spawned eponymous films in 1935 and 1992. Matthew Barber’s adaptation (a 1925 play that flopped) was nominated last year for a Tony Award for Best Play.
The actors credit director Shook, who returns to ACT after directing Edward Albee’s “The Goat – or Who is Sylvia?” last year, with adding new layers of emotion and meaning to the romantic comedy.
“Warren is not going for the jokes as much as revealing the hearts of these women,” Kenny said.
Another pleasure for “April’s” mostly female ensemble is working in a play that plants women at center stage. Fialkow said it is too limiting to label the play feminist but notes how extraordinary it was for women to travel alone in the 1920s.
Fialkow said the play raises questions 21st-century people still ask about marriage and identity. “The play is awesome,” she said, “because it shows the best is yet to come.”
Chris Bennion photo
Suzanne Bouchard (left) and Julie Briskman rehearse their roles in ACT Theatre’s “Enchanted April.”
“Enchanted April”
An ACT Theatre production through Aug. 8 at the ACT Theatre, 700 Union St., Seattle. Performances at 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 7:30 p.m. Sundays and Tuesdays through Thursdays, and matinees at 2 p.m. Saturday, Sunday and Thursday,and Aug.1, 7 and 8. Post-play discussions following the Tuesday, Aug. 1 matinee and Aug. 8 evening performance. Tickets, $15-$54 at the box office, 206-292-7676, www.acttheatre.org.
“Enchanted April”
An ACT Theatre production through Aug. 8 at the ACT Theatre, 700 Union St., Seattle. Performances at 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 7:30 p.m. Sundays and Tuesdays through Thursdays, and matinees at 2 p.m. Saturday, Sunday and Thursday,and Aug.1, 7 and 8. Post-play discussions following the Tuesday, Aug. 1 matinee and Aug. 8 evening performance. Tickets, $15-$54 at the box office, 206-292-7676, www.acttheatre.org.
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