FRANCE TRIMS ITS 1% WITH THE GUILLOTINE
2014 has been as good to 1859 as it was to the late 18th century. Christopher M. Walsh’s adaptation of Charles Dickens’ novel—a saga of unexpected heroism during the French Revolution–is Lifeline Theatre latest page-to-stage triumph. Dickens put faces to history, and in 150 minutes Walsh’s new version “rereads” the work into 
stirring action. Thanks to John Henry Robertson as the “Resurrection Man” narrator, Walsh also adds an acerbic point of view. (The R.M. sees folly on both sides: Our sole redemption is, it seems, our peculiar preference for “our better angels”—as Lincoln said at the same time–over our worser instincts.)
No crude condensation mars Lifeline’s supple restoration: Its current swiftly propels the citizens of two cities into crises and confrontations between 1775 to 1790. Coherent as it makes the sprawling story of a feckless lawyer’s ultimate sacrifice for the woman he loved but lost, this Tale of Two Cities also drives home Dickens’ sharply-detailed contrast of the best and worst of times: More than the English channel separates the Parisians, divided between a mob mentality and a fascist aristocracy, and Londoners, comparative moderates who pluckily work to secure justice beyond Dr. Manette’s release from the Bastille.
That good doctor must return to the scene of the crime to save an innocent man from the busy tumbrels that lead to an overachieving guillotine. But in Dickens’ love triangle there are two more innocent men. Charles Darnay may have repudiated his lineage to the Marquis St. Evremonde, cruelest of the ancient regime’s malevolent masters, but, nonetheless, this fiancé of lovely Lucy, daughter of the doctor, finds himself imprisoned by the implacable Defarges and the Revolutionary Tribunal. His one hope lies in the man who defended him years before, Sydney Carton, the self-deprecating, drunken wastrel of an attorney. But Sydney’s one stake in life or claim to the future is his hopeless adoration of Lucy, the love of his life who gave herself to the rival that Sydney must save. By story’s end this strange savior has found a new way to stake that claim. It’s one of the great renunciation scenes in 19th century literature.
Happily, Elise Kauzlaric’s staging is as driven as the plot. As the at times rather matter-of-fact Lucie Manette, Maggie Scrantom rises to the occasion as devotion confers courage. Playing the persecuted and brain-broken Dr. Manette, “called to life” after 18 years in the Bastille, Sean Sinitski delivers the pathos of a promising physician imprisoned for knowing too much about the hateful Evremondes. Carolyn Klein breathes hell and damnation as Madame Defarge, her well-deserved demise as satisfactory as it ever felt on the page. Deserving merit finds its natural home in Nicholas Bailey’s stalwart Charles Darnay, who bears a necessary resemblance to the semi-suicidal Sydney–an interpretation that is not always the case in stage and film adaptations of this work. In the complicated role of a survivor who discovers a greater glory (“a far, far better thing” indeed), Josh Hambrock restores Sydney’s self-respect, with nothing becoming his life so much as how he leaves it.
Kauzlaric leaves nothing to chance, crafting stirring support from Katie McLean Hainsworth as Miss Pross, the feisty and very British governess, Chris Hainsworth as a predatory patrician and unscrupulous spy, and Dean Granata as Monsieur Defarge, a henpecked radical who should overthrow his wife as much as Louis XVI. Roberts’ sardonic narrator weaves it together as seamlessly as Mme. Defarge does her dangerous knitting.
Has Dickens imagined the future as much as the past? At first Occupy Wall Street seemed to be more than just a blast from the past. But no Bastille has fallen: We’re left with a realm as divided as anything France endured 225 years ago.
photos by Suzanne Plunkett
A Tale of Two Cities
Lifeline Theatre, 6912 N. Glenwood Ave.
scheduled to end on April 6, 2014
EXTENDED to April 13, 2014
for tickets, call 773-761-4477 or visit www.lifelinetheatre.com
for info on this and other Chicago Theater, visit http://www.TheatreinChicago.com
