October 5, 2006 Issue                                       

Click Here

©2006 The Chestnut Hill Local

Audiences can be grateful this ‘Prayer’ is answered
by CLARK GROOME

Quite often, maybe most of the time, when a great novel is adapted for the stage I’m tempted to advise people to read the book. It’s a difficult business to capture the narrative and description needed for a novel and transfer it effectively to the stage, where dialogue and action reign supreme.

Not so with Simon Bent’s adaptation of John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany. Although I’ve never read the novel, folks who have who were at opening night told me that the stage version stuck very close to the original.

The result of this collaboration between novel and playwright is an evening of funny, moving, human theater. Irving’s story of the short-of-stature-but-big-of-heart-and-spirit Owen Meany is a rich, nuanced tale of friendship, faith, survival and love. There are several interdependent plot lines. They all mesh believably in the play that is being handsomely, even impressively, produced through October 15 at the Arden Theatre.

The story, not to reveal too much, is about the friendship between Owen Meany (Doug Hara) and John Wheelwright (Ian Merrill Peakes). We follow their relationship from the time they’re eight until 1968 when Meany dies, something he always knew would happen – not the dying but the date and the circumstances.

The young Wheelwright is a loyal, kind and loving friend. Owen is something of an oddball, yet in many ways totally normal for someone his age. He is physically small and has a voice that has basically never changed.

The complex and delightful story involves both the boys’ relationships to their faith, to their contemporaries, to their families and to the world outside their somewhat insulated lives un Gravesend, New Hampshire, in the 1950s and ‘60s.

John Wheelwright is the story’s narrator, so we actually relive the events that took place between 1953 and 1968 as he remembers them, which gives the play and its characters a depth that might not have been possible if it were just dramatized as it happened.

As Owen and John, Doug Hara and Ian Merrill Peakes are flat-out spectacular. Just when you think they can’t get any better, delve into their characters any more deeply and find additional nuances, they do.

The rest of the large (15-member) cast is terrific, to say the least. Standouts were Karen Peakes as Tabitha Wheelwright, John’s mother; Mary Martello as Harriet Wheelwright, Tabitha’s mother; Kevin Bergen as Dan Needham, John’s stepfather; Maureen Torsney-Weir as the legless Lydia; and Scott Greer, Anthony Lawton, Paul Nolan and Catharine K. Slusar in multiple roles.

Director Terrence J. Nolen just keeps getting better. Each time I see his latest directorial effort, I am impressed at how sensitive and imaginative he is.

The handsome physical production – evocatively designed by Christopher Pickart (sets), Alison Roberts (costumes), Kenton Yeager (lighting) and Jorge Cousineau (sound) – is an ideal environment on which to tell Irving’s moving story.

While the plot complexities may seem a lot to handle for some, I had no trouble keeping track of what was going on and who was who. It’s likely that someone with a red pencil could cut maybe 15 minutes out of the two-and-one-half-plus-hour running time.

Yet I had so much fun at and was so moved by the Arden’s A Prayer for Owen Meany that I can do little but spread hosannas all around.

For tickets to the Arden Theatre Company production of A Prayer for Owen Meany, running through October 15, call 215-922-1122 or visit www.ardentheatre.org.