At first glance, it’s not easy to see what’s so darned enchanting about “Enchanted April.” This is an honored new play, but it’s dated and slow-paced, the language is creaky, and its melancholy characters seem straight out of a Jane Austen period novel.
So how is it that by its end, this bygone gentle character study of four disparate British women whose pulses quicken upon vacationing on the Italian coast of Mezzago ultimately manages to slightly quicken audiences’ pulses, as well?
That must be its enchantment.
For some reason, rights to perform this 2003 Tony-nominated best play are not yet open to metro theater companies. But they are available elsewhere, which only adds to the mystique of stagings last January in Evergreen, now in Creede and next year in Fort Collins.
The play, based on a 1922 novel by Elizabeth von Arnim that remained fairly obscure until Mike Newell turned it into a 1991 indie film, opens in relentlessly rainy London. It is a depressing post-war setting where most wives are either war widows or might as well be. How does one go on in this sad place, when so much already has been lost?
But when effusive young Lotty organizes a gals-only month in a rented villa, everything comes alive – the mood, the colors, the women themselves.
The play is a subtle, old-fashioned talker in which the only real action is the blooming of these women into varying states of liberation. It’s a simple conceit, really: March showers (in this case) bring April flowers.
The first thing one notices in the Creede Repertory Theatre’s leisurely and moody staging are the umbrellas suspended from the rafters and the on-stage piano man who adds an elegant if somber live underscore.
From there everything hinges on how well the audience connects with these unusual women. The wonderful young Allison McLemore, summoning all the graceful charm of Audrey Hepburn, plays Lotty. Her conspirator is Rose (Trary Maddalone), a similarly repressed but far more dour fellow housewife who’s compared to the weeping Madonna (this is the part Molly Ringwald played on Broadway).
To pay for their escape, they seek out new travel companions. They find Lady Bramble (Rebecca Gibel), a glamorous but mysteriously forlorn beauty seeking escape, and Mrs. Graves (Peggy Pharr Wilson), an oddly severe older woman you might think a more appropriate traveling companion for the Griswolds of “Vacation” lore. Her armor is chinked by a found mutual appreciation for her beloved Tennyson.
These actors are luxuriating in their rich characters but still searching for an appropriate pace and a handle on what little comic terrain there is to till here. A trio of men offers solid support roles, even though the plot stumbles in revealing an unlikely and then oddly unresolved bond between two supposed strangers. Chad Afanador, as Lotty’s husband, steals the show with the play’s only moment of unbounded hilarity.
“Enchanted April” is a tough little bloomer to till. I can’t help but think that if it made such a splash on Broadway, then at its best it should communicate a much greater transformation from “inhibition to unrestrained joy,” as it has been described by others, than we are now seeing.
But like those fermenting Italian grapes, this staging still has plenty of time to grow.
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-820-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.
“Enchanted April” | ** 1/2
DRAMEDY|Creede Repertory Theatre, 124 N. Main St., Creede|Adapted by Matthew Barber|Directed by Maurice LaMee|THROUGH SEPT. 30|8 p.m. Tuesday, dates then vary| 2 hours, 55 minutes|$18-$25|719-658-2540, 866-658-2540, or creederep.org
