Review: Edith Wharton’s Gilded Age Comes Alive in Arena Stage’s ‘The Age of Innocence’
The adaptation is cohesive and the actors shine, but the production straddles two divergent stylistic approaches in attempting to stage a period piece for a modern audience.
By D.R. Lewis
March 17, 2025
This review originally appeared in Washington City Paper.
In a New York Times essay last fall, Shakespeare Theatre Company artistic producer Drew Lichtenberg quoted an unnamed theater administrator regarding the challenging post-pandemic state of the arts when he said, “Agatha Christie is single-handedly saving the American regional theatre.” As the recovery continues, and the future of federal arts funding is called into question, it’s no wonder that regional theaters are calling on properties with strong name recognition and a deep well of public goodwill to bring audiences through their doors. Even the Broadway season abounds with adaptations, from Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray to television shows Stranger Things and Smash, and films Death Becomes Her and Good Night, and Good Luck.
Arena Stage, among the most storied and historic regional theaters in the country, is no exception to the trend. Artistic director Hana S. Sharif, who staged Christie’s Death on the Nile late last year, has brought Edith Wharton’s beloved novel, The Age of Innocence, to the Fichandler Stage, in a smart new adaptation by Karen Zacarías running through March 30.
The adaptation model is a double-edged sword. For all its promotional promise, living up to the memory of the existing intellectual property is tough, especially when transcending form, as in the case of The Age of Innocence, from a read medium to a viewed medium. Wharton’s Gilded Age novel—which follows wealthy society man Newland Archer (A.J. Shively) as he navigates an intensifying mutual infatuation with Countess Ellen Olenska (Shereen Ahmed), the married aristocratic cousin of his bride-to-be May Welland (Delphi Borich)—is rife with commentary on the strict social conventions and antiquated standards of etiquette in 1870s New York. Zacarías has wisely preserved much of Wharton’s witty critical voice in her adaptation, recasting Granny Mingott (an excellent Felicia Curry) as a sort of proxy for the author and going so far as to repeat some of the novel’s most delicious opening lines verbatim: “It was one of the great livery-stableman’s most masterly intuitions to have discovered that Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it.”
But isolating a novel’s dialogue can prove a more difficult task. In trimming more than 200 pages of text into a reasonable performance length (this adaptation clocks in at a little over three hours), one wonders how much can be cut before threatening the structural integrity of the story. In this regard, Zacarías, whose original plays have appeared on Arena’s stages, has done good work, resisting the minutiae of book-length storytelling that would otherwise prevent the play from clipping easily along.
If Zacarías’ play is thorough and cohesive, though, Sharif’s production is less so. Staging a period piece for a modern audience, Arena’s Age of Innocence attempts to straddle two divergent stylistic approaches: one that cheekily ribs the ridiculousness of snobby society with a wink and a nod, and another played straight as to let the source material and its streamlined form speak for themselves. The leading players almost universally fall into the latter stylistic camp and for the better. But the regular appearances of mismatched accents, over-the-top physical flourishes, and overwrought line readings in the production around them only confound the more conservative decisions that ground the play. It’s not simply that they feel out of step with the production, but that they seem especially gauche for the period in question. Perhaps it’s a stylistic extension of the HBO series The Gilded Age, which is aesthetically sumptuous, but dramatically thin in its broad survey of 19th-century New York society. But The Age of Innocence, in all its restrained yearning and quiet desire for personal freedom, is a fundamentally different piece and it shouldn’t feel the need to compensate similarly.
Shively, Ahmed, Borich, and Curry shine regardless. As Newland, Shively develops his character’s obsession with Ellen steadily and convincingly from initial detachment. His chemistry with Ahmed, who so artfully conveys the depth of soul that sets Ellen apart from the society folk who once reared and have now scorned her, grows organically over the course of the play. And Borich is delightfully deceptive in her strategic matrimonial maneuvers.
For their first staging within the in-the-round Fichandler, Sharif and set designer Tim Mackabee have passed on the overly ornate stylings you’d expect from a Gilded Age setting in favor of something more abstract. Elevated opera boxes that loom over the four stage doors go above and beyond their pragmatic purpose in the play’s opening scene, which takes place in the long-gone Academy of Music, to lift and obscure society’s prying eyes. And a rotating sequence of living and dining rooms that emerge from the shiny black floor (which is finely inlaid with various offset parquets to signal the various homes) are substantial enough to not leave the sprawling stage appearing empty.
Costume designer Fabio Toblini’s best contributions are the intricate, elaborate gowns that allow Ellen to stand out against the more conservative fabrics of old New York. Sound designers Charles Coes and Nathan A. Roberts combine with lighting designer Xavier Pierce to show the audience how well such coordinated “backstage” elements can elevate a production. Synched cues do overtime in signaling both a shift in time or narrator, and a major emotional development. Coes and Roberts’ incidental music, which starts with the string quartet selections you’d expect, becomes increasingly ethereal as Newland and Ellen float helplessly into uncharted emotional waters.
For all the recent punditry of a new American Gilded Age, Arena Stage’s The Age of Innocence prioritizes the personal over the overtly political. Though Newland and Ellen are wanting for love, they’re certainly not wanting for wealth, which puts them bounds ahead of their neighbors, like the sick woman who receives a massive bouquet of hand-me-down yellow roses that Ellen’s not-so-secret admirer intended for the countess. With precarious contemporary economics not only pervading the theater industry, but being felt acutely across so many facets and strata of American society, investing in the price of a ticket for three hours of sad rich people problems may feel a tall order for some, regardless of how beloved Wharton’s century-old story may be.
But every so often, Wharton and Zacarías land the kind of unexpected punch that is at the heart of the novel, and which reminds us of how prescient the author’s critique of wealth was then, and now: “We all have our pet common people,” one guest of the Archers’ announces over dinner, as though he wasn’t aware of the servant standing at attention to his right.
The Age of Innocence, based on the novel by Edith Wharton, adapted by Karen Zacarías, and directed by Hana S. Sharif, runs through March 30 at Arena Stage. arenastage.org. $45–$99.
Delphi Borich (May Welland) and A.J. Shively (Newland Archer). Photo by Daniel Rader.