Age of Innocence at McCarter Theater

These flowers are less symbolic than the ones in Age of Innocence, but they sat on my windowsill in England. Of note: yellow roses.

It's hard to believe that it has been more than a month since I saw the stage adaptation of Age of Innocence and more than two months since I first read Edith Wharton's gorgeous novel. I promised myself and a couple of friends that I would share my impressions of the adaptation—directed by Douglas McGrath and performed at McCarter Theater—with special thanks to my friend Jess who had first recommended that I read the novel upon moving back to NYC (I am so glad she did!).

Age of Innocence sweeps us into the Gilded Age of the 1870s, placing us in a setting where the society has everything to do with the story. It begins as an old man exclaims, “If one had habitually breathed in the New York air there were times when anything less crystalline seemed stifling.” In the novel, we see events unfold through the eyes of our protagonist, the young Newland Archer, in real time. But in the adaptation, it is an old man—Archer as an elderly man—who reflects back upon his life and narrates. On stage, we know from the beginning that a lifetime will come to pass before our eyes. From the old man, we hear in his exclamation an exasperation with a city’s set customs that the man has lived through. But when reading that same line through the thoughts of the young Archer, we are privy to his naïve admiration for this city’s social propriety. 

On stage, the subtleties of scene embrace our senses, but miss that tool the narrator of the word has at her disposal: inner thought. So, when Archer spontaneously sends Countess Olenska, his forbidden love interest, a bouquet of “fiery” yellow roses rather than the usual pure white lilies for his fiancée, he remarks onstage, "What am I doing?!". On the page, Archer subconsciously justifies his actions—no expressed outcry, no pained expression. As readers, we are invited to speculate upon our protagonist's unexamined thoughts in our own minds, analyzing his intentions and desires. But as viewers, we can't indulge in back-and-forth speculation. For a point to come across, we must feel it—the colored cheeks, heart-quickening breathlessness, shocked expression, strained voice, and then there’s the old man—the older Archer—re-experiencing with alarm his actions alongside young Archer on the same stage. All of this makes it apparent that at that moment something is awry. None of our own flirtations with the possibilities of the page. Rather, the immediate sensory symbolisms of the moment.

The old Archer wears a white lily in his coat pocket, as does the young Archer—constancy for May. A vase of yellow roses adorns the piano, which turn bright red when Olenska enters the room—Archer’s passion for Olenska. May sits under a peach tree as she implores Archer to give her up if he loves another—ripe with innocent goodness. 

The sensory feast heightens an aura of dreaminess, of unreality—which is a theme of the story: Archer reaches for what might have been, an ideal of what could be, and savors the delight of that unreached ideal. Olenska embodies that ideal. She appears and the lighting is slanted, mystical—in the softness of moonlight, or the glow of dusk—and in one heartbreaking scene where the lovers unite but cannot be together, petals fall like snow outside the windows. The song, “Beautiful Dreamer,” haunts us throughout the play: first when Olenska and Archer sing together, again when Archer sings with May, and in the final scene when Olenska sings out her window 26 years later. The song, an auditory exemplar of dreaminess, doesn't exist in the novel yet in the adaptation it even plays a plot device: it is because of the song that May confirms that Archer loves Olenska, as he begs her to sing a song that he sang with Olenska, and the wooing words render May speechless mid-song. 

When is it not right to love? What obligations do we have to those around us, to our neighbors? How could we bear to hurt those who are good, even if it costs us our own happiness? These are the kind of moral questions at the core of the story. Olenska reflects Archer’s own sentiments back to him, “We shall hurt others less. Isn't it, after all, what you always wanted?” If Archer had to give up his respect for society and kindliness towards neighbors for his own happiness and for Olenska, the dream and love would break: “I can't love you unless I give you up,” says Olenska. Each sacrifice for the other and for those around them. 

Moral questions lend themselves better to reflection in the privacy of one’s (reading) room rather than in a theater. In this theater, we experience a vivid, beautiful, well-executed dream, but the dream suffers from a lack of trust in how real the events are: are they memories seen through rose-colored lens of an older narrator? Are they too sensual and exquisite so as to evade scrutiny of thoughts? 

Even if not in the theater, the time for analysis inevitably comes (probably in the lobby!). We have to grapple with what happens—what is dream and what is reality, and what is better, if there can be a “better”? While Archer lives in dreams and visions, that is not all. If that was all, the story would be tragic. In the ending scene, we want to snap Archer out of dream and into reality. But the reality is that Archer and Olenska stayed true to their values and themselves, their unrealized love made them better people, and this is rare and beautiful. What happened was not a romanticized reverie clouded by an elder’s reflection of youth. What happened unfolded in a real time, place, and manner. People tried to live out their lives as best they could, afforded to them by the limits of society—the story that we try to live out today as best we can.