THEATER REVIEW : A Mixed Bag of Stories About Women and Foolish Love

Henry James greatly admired Ivan Turgenev, calling him “the most touching of writers.” As it happens, both authors are currently represented on Broadway, both with tales about wealthy women in the mid-19th Century who fall in love foolishly. Yet, judging from these two plays, James has hands-down the better, more touching story.

Turgenev’s “A Month in the Country” at the Roundabout Theatre Company stars Helen Mirren as Natalya, an indulged Russian wife who falls in love with her son’s young tutor, primarily because she has nothing else to do. Even in Mirren’s intelligent performance, Natalya’s lack of self-knowledge is annoying, and we observe her character’s anguish as if from a distance. Through her actions, Natalya essentially destroys the life of her exuberant young charge, Vera (delightfully played by Kathryn Erbe, who also shows up in the film “Kiss of Death” as the baby-sitter who gets promoted to David Caruso’s wife).

But while Vera, who loses the most, is on the periphery of Turgenev’s drama, the parallel character is center stage in “The Heiress,” based on the James novel “Washington Square” and adapted for the stage in 1947 by Ruth and Augustus Goetz. Olivia de Havilland won an Oscar for playing the heiress, Catherine Sloper, in the great 1949 William Wyler film also starring Ralph Richardson and Montgomery Clift.

Catherine is a more complex victim than Vera and an infinitely more sympathetic protagonist than Natalya. She is a pathologically shy and motherless young woman who lives for the paltry approval of her father, an esteemed doctor (played by Donald Moffat), who cannot hide his keen disappointment in his awkward daughter. Catherine lives with the rather heartbreaking hope that she can soften each of her father’s rebuffs with infinite gentleness and sweetness, a strategy that only makes her seem more simpering to him. We get very close to Catherine’s agony, almost inside of it, thanks to Cherry Jones’ superbly modulated performance, which should win her a Tony nomination on Monday.

Catherine comes to place an almost idiotic trust in an impoverished suitor named Morris (played with nice unreadability by Jon Tenney). Morris clearly wants Catherine’s money, but he also may see something hidden in this sometimes surprisingly charming and severely underappreciated girl. Whatever his motive, Morris offers Catherine a view of herself that she desperately needs in order to replace the contempt of her father.

*

The story of Catherine Sloper is irresistible on two fronts--as a disastrous love story and as the devastating tale of a child brutalized by a father who claims, with some good reason, that he is trying to protect her. Dr. Sloper wants to bestow greater sense on his daughter, as he puts it, to give her a pair of spectacles. They may be the most costly pair of spectacles in all of literature.

In the famous scene where her father plainly tells Catherine that Morris could not possibly love her--and why--he does in fact give her a pair of spectacles. He is both a monstrous and a responsible guardian. “The Heiress” at the Cort Theatre is such a fulfilling drama because there are several ways to look at each character’s motives, all of them valid.

Sloper (Moffat), for instance, sees only Morris’ avarice, which is certainly there. But Morris’ sister (Lizbeth MacKay) offers us a credible alternative view of his behavior. And just as you begin to think that possibly the doctor might in fact be acting responsibly toward his daughter, his cruelty becomes breathtaking and nothing is certain.

Jones plays the early Catherine as a big-boned girl who seems perpetually trying to blend into the curtains whenever there is company. She is seized by terror when required to converse, answering questions with yes or no and then looking quickly away.

When her father is saying something disapproving, Jones’ Catherine gazes into the distance with an unfocused stare and a wan smile, the way some actresses used to play blind women. Later, her gaze grows icy and direct, at around the time she realizes that despite an enormous inheritance she has, in fact, been cheated by her father. Like him, she allows a trauma to make her a master of cruelty, another of her father’s legacies.

“The Heiress” is an old-fashioned drama in the best sense, fully satisfying and as gripping as a steel clamp. “A Month in the Country,” unfortunately, is more like a week in Philadelphia.

* “A Month in the Country,” directed by Scott Ellis, Roundabout Theatre Company, Criterion Center, 1530 Broadway, N . Y., (212) 869-8400.

* “The Heiress,” Cort Theatre, directed by Gerald Gutierrez, 138 W. 48th St., N.Y., (212) 239-6200.