Lady Chatterley (Michelle Shupe) and her game- keeper lover, Oliver Mellors (Hugh T. Owen), resume their assignations this spring, hoping to re-create the steam they added last summer to the sultriness that is Washington in July and August.
“We hope to bring back the magic of the show, which really has lingered in the audiences’ minds,” says John Vreeke, who directed with body and soul the six-actor adaptation of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” last year for the Washington Shakespeare Company.
In the revival, there is a new Lord Chatterley, played by Ian Armstrong, and Mr. Vreeke has excised at least 10 minutes from the script. “It is clearer, more defined and more specific,” he says. “That’s the beauty of bringing shows back — you can clean up little things you thought didn’t work.”
Mr. Vreeke has been dallying with “Lady Chatterley” since 1997, when he and Mary Machala, founding member of Seattle’s Book-It Repertory Theatre, decided to adapt D.H. Lawrence’s epic novel about class consciousness and carnality to the stage. The first reading was seven hours long, but subsequent whittling has left the play at quite a bit less than three hours. Deciding that all the action onstage needed to be filtered through Connie Chatterley’s mind guided them in choosing which material from the novel to keep.
“When we opened it in Seattle, we were pleasantly surprised by all of the humor in it, as well as the eroticism,” Mr. Vreeke says. “All of the dialogue and language in the play is exclusively Lawrence’s, but we cut and rearranged things so that it would flow theatrically. It was a big hit in Seattle, and then it went onto L.A., where it ran successfully for six months.”
The key to the show’s popularity, Mr. Vreeke believes, is the handling of the sexuality. “We are very specific in the stage directions about the love scenes — they are fully clothed,” he explains. “The audience’s expectations — ’They must be getting naked now, hoo-boy’ — are thwarted because we held off the nudity in the most obvious places. When Lady Chatterley and Mellors finally do shed their clothes, there is an innocence between them — they play in the rain like children — and there is an eroticism in an almost Adam and Eve sort of way.”
Never once did the Washington Shakespeare Company or any of the other theaters staging “Chatterley” receive a complaint about being offensive. “And that includes my 87-year-old mother,” Mr. Vreeke says. “Many of the women 50 and older who saw the play remember a time when they were very young and hid ’Lady Chatterley’ under the mattress. They get to relive that time in their lives.”
That’s not to say that “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” is rated G. “Even though it was written in 1928, it is filthy,” Mr. Vreeke says. “But Lawrence wasn’t just talking dirty, he was railing against a lot of puritan sentiment and morality that he didn’t think was right. He used Mellors as his spokesperson, advocating the natural order of life.”
What Mr. Vreeke calls “the development of a woman’s sensual awakening” is another source of the play’s contemporary appeal. “The play is physical, but not in the usual sense,” says Miss Shupe, who plays Lady Chatterley. “It is lovely, and it transcends. Yes, the book and the play are about sex — which is not this dirty, shameful thing. It is something everybody wants.”
Miss Shupe was approached by Mr. Vreeke when she was performing in “Born Guilty” at Theatre J. “I read the book four times over, and I was just rabid for the part,” she recalls. “And when I got the role, I was so thrilled to work with John, who encouraged us to make frightening choices. You thought ’I might as well run and jump off the cliff,’ because John was always there with a safety net.”
She thought audiences would attend the show for the titillation factor, but she and Mr. Owen were often moved by their audiences’ rapt attentiveness. “The first place you feel it is when Connie touches the hatchlings, and then you can sense the audience holding their breath together until Connie and Mellors have mutually satisfying sex,” she says. “There was a silence, an anticipation, that floored us.”
Miss Shupe sees Constance not as a victim of the British class system and sexual repression. “I think that Connie is very smart, but very naive. She is not worldly-wise, and that is what Mellors loves about her. There is a delicacy and vulnerability to her that is startling to play.”
This time around, Miss Shupe revisited the book and found that every single person was grieving in some way or another. “So I am tapping into the sorrow and the loneliness of Connie and all the other characters, which I hope will be a deeper experience,” she explains.
With “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” and an exquisite recent production at Theatre J of Tony Kushner’s “Homebody/Kabul,” Mr. Vreeke is gaining a reputation for taking dense, text-heavy works and making them take flight in unexpected and exhilarating ways.
“I certainly like the stuff that’s literature-oriented and not readily apparent on the stage,” he says. “The challenge for me is to think past the literature and find ways to physicalize it.”
WHAT: “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” by D.H. Lawrence
WHERE: Washington Shakespeare Company, 601 S. Clark St., Arlington
WHEN: Playing in repertory with “Waiting for Godot” through May 22.
TICKETS: $22 to $30
PHONE: 800/494-8497
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