Milwaukee Rep's 'Jane Eyre' offers double vision of heroine

Charlotte Brontë begins “Jane Eyre” in the cold, as young Jane takes shelter from a “chilly afternoon” and reads of the Arctic’s “forlorn regions of dreary space.”

Jane could have been describing scenic designer Kris Stone’s cold but effective modernist set for the Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s stark production of “Jane Eyre,” which opened Friday night under KJ Sanchez’s direction.

Underscoring the isolated Jane’s own deprivation as well as the bleak northern England of Brontë’s novel, Stone’s nearly bare, off-white foreground is linked through a series of climbing switchbacks to a small upstage box containing a red room, perched above and seemingly removed from the set.

That red room is where an orphaned Jane is locked away as a child by relatives treating her with contempt and cruelty.  And it’s where Bertha – Jane’s nemesis but also her double – is locked away during much of this play, watching Jane morph into the proper Victorian woman that Bertha herself is never able to be.

In the Polly Teale adaptation being staged here, Margaret Ivey’s Jane and Rin Allen’s Bertha had once been boon companions.  Initially dressed in red, Bertha shadows the more austerely dressed Jane, while embodying the lithe, free-spirited side of herself that Jane gradually learns to tamp down. It is Jane who first locks Bertha away, in a world where women are rendered invisible.

As she paces the red room, Allen gives big, full-throttled expression to all that the corseted Jane cannot.  Harrowing as a sometimes straitjacketed mad woman, Allen can also be beautiful as she joyfully embodies Jane’s passion, channeling Peter Kyle’s striking movement choreography.

For all that, I’ll admit there were times I forgot Allen was perched above me; that’s the point.  Along with Ivey’s Jane, I instead found myself caught up in the busy nothings of the conscious world, brought to life by an ensemble of eight additional actors playing dozens of characters as well as animals.

Andy Paterson, for example, injected humor through his presentation of Pilot, Rochester’s dog; Rebecca Hirota did the same as the impish Adèle, for whom Jane serves as governess.

Treating the set as a giant percussive instrument, ensemble members also pounded the sound of Jane’s furiously beating heart – true to all she feels for Rochester, whom Michael Sharon presents as gruff and saturnine but also smoldering with repressed passion.  Sharon and Ivey sell the great love their characters share.

I wasn’t always sold on this adaptation; it can feel rushed after intermission, despite Sanchez’s smooth, well-executed transitions.

More important, Teale never reconciles her doubling conceit – which champions Bertha’s passion – with a novel that eventually kills Bertha off.  In the waning moments of the play, Allen’s resurrected Bertha can seem insipid.  Then again, one can sometimes say the same of  Brontë’s Jane, created in an era when even a radical writer felt compelled to pull her punches.

“Jane Eyre” continues through May 21 at the Quadracci Powerhouse Theater, 108 E. Wells St.  For tickets, visit milwaukeerep.com.  Read more about this production at TapMilwaukee.com.

PROGRAM NOTES

Backwards and Forwards: “The restlessness was in my nature,” the narrating Jane says in Brontë’s novel.  “It agitated me to pain sometimes.  Then my sole relief was to walk along the corridor of the third story, backwards and forwards . . . and allow my mind’s eye to dwell on whatever bright visions rose before it . . .”

“Jane Eyre” is a restless novel; characters are constantly on the move and Jane herself, as this representative passage suggests, cannot keep still as she continually imagines being somewhere else.  No corset can hold her, even if a typically spot-on costume design from Rachel Anne Healy (more below) puts her in one.

With its switchbacks, Stone’s set is built for movement, and we get plenty of it.  Jane and Bertha lead the way, zigging and zagging to suggest their inner tumult.  Even when Jane slows down, Bertha often keeps going, literally trying to climb walls as she writhes and turns within the narrow confines of her attic prison. 

Ostensibly ugly as this set is, it doesn’t just aid and abet Sanchez’s scenic transitions.  It also allows Kyle’s movement choreography the room it needs to capture the tension between a corseted stillness and the wildly gyrating emotion such stillness conceals.  In the closing moments of Act I, we get a particularly fine example of the payoff, involving a joyous Bertha embodying the new love between Jane and Rochester.  I won’t give it away; but you’ll know it when you see it.  It’s breathtakingly beautiful.

Burning Bright: Cut to the waning moments of Act II, when a Bertha returned from the dead celebrates a similarly joyous (if less probable) moment during which Rochester and Jane are reunited.  Bertha here seems superfluous, and the message her presence conveys in Teale’s adaptation is confusing.  Bertha has just died, after all, in a blaze she herself set – within an adaptation repeatedly insisting that such fiery passion is to be championed and valued. 

So then what is Sanchez saying, here, in directing the ensemble to extinguish the many candles that had arrestingly symbolized all Bertha feels?  That such passion must be contained?  That one can have too much of a good thing?  Is she making a pointed commentary and criticism of a Jane who, in the novel, reverts to calling Rochester “my master” in the novel’s closing pages?  

It’s all a bit of a muddle; one suspects that Teale’s conceit – so smart, powerful and true in many respects to who Jane is – hijacked the novel.  Read on . . .  

Putting Jane on a Pedestal: With all due respect to Allen – whose Bertha is quite compelling – Bertha ought to have been left dead once that fiery blaze did her in.  Brontë had killed Bertha off because she ultimately shrunk from what Teale rightly divines Bertha symbolizes: female desire, unleashed and free to express itself, in a world where such expression meant damnation (a concept the religiously inclined Brontë took very seriously). 

Having killed Bertha, Brontë closes her novel by domesticating Jane.  In resisting that ending because she doesn’t like it, and substituting one of her own that celebrates female empowerment, Teale arguably does exactly what Brontë did: she creates a customized version of hagiography requiring a woman to become a saint. 

Might the ending of this adaptation have been better and more effective if we’d been permitted to wrestle with all Jane loses at novel’s end, rather than what she ostensibly gains in marrying Rochester?  Why not allow an audience to read Bertha’s death for the tragedy that it is, rather than creating a fairy tale in which Bertha is permitted to rise from the dead? 

Instead, Teale joins Brontë in putting Jane on a pedestal; her version canonizes Jane as a feminist saint, much as Brontë resurrected the Victorian angel in the house.  Neither the novel nor the adaptation accepts Jane – or Bertha – for who they really are.  The result, in both novel and adaptation, is a disappointing and slightly preachy ending to what is often a thrillingly radical story.

Illuminating the Story: Another advantage to Stone’s wonderful set is how well its neutral tones take light; designer Brian J. Lilienthal makes the most of the resulting opportunity.  Who needs naturalistic scenery when lighting can deliver the chilly blues of a wintry landscape and a desolate soul; the greens of a Caribbean paradise and new love; or the fiery orange and red of a raging inferno and a blazing passion?  True to the expressionist aesthetic of this production, Sanchez and her design team trust the audience to use its imagination in seeing the external worlds and internal landscapes they’ve conjured.  Lilienthal’s lighting design illuminates what we see.

Sounding the Story: Traditional spirituals and country dances.  Early Romanticism and jagged Modernism.  Composer and sound designer Jane Shaw gives us all this and more (including a touch of the Caribbean, to honor Bertha), delivered by a cast with some exceptionally good voices.  It’s supplemented by the previously mentioned use of the set as a percussive instrument, designed by Stone so that the most modest of taps sounds loudly and dramatically.  

Shaw’s supremely intelligent music and sound design is a huge, very moving plus to this production.  Like Healy’s costuming, it marks a transitional moment within England, between a largely rural and often evangelical past and a more romantic and individualized future – true to a Jane caught between duty and desire; tradition and freedom; classical proportion and romantic inclination; and communitarian impulses and individualized expression.