Jo March encompasses curiosity and delight, a critical component of the grand house she dwells within. It’s not because she feels more important than her sisters, but because she knows she is the gatekeeper of their legacy, forever in the conscience of millions of readers.
Lauren Gunderson’s world premiere adaptation of “Little Women” is the comfort food presentation of Louisa May Alcott’s transcendent 1868 novel, produced by TheatreWorks Silicon Valley, part of a series of multiple commissioned world premieres taking place throughout the country.
The focus is on the four March sisters who weave their way through the duality of the joy and tragedy of Civil War-era Massachusetts. While the story is a massive part of American folklore, the production itself has its troubles focusing two unevenly balanced halves, with Act 2 possessing the higher and richer stakes. The production, directed with a flowing urgency from Giovanna Sardelli, is transcendent in plenty of places, but stalls and crawls in others.
Jo (Elissa Beth Stebbins) is an established cog in the house’s hierarchy. She possesses a maternal heart, her only other loyalty to her pen. She is the overseer of her lovely sisters Meg (Emily Ota), Beth (Lauren Hart) and Amy (Sharon Shao), with their tender matriarch Marmee (Cathleen Ridley) navigating her parent duties while worrying for her soldier husband.
The house is loaded with love and laughter, the settling sounds of Beth’s piano providing a pleasant soundtrack as the girls flow through the common room in dresses as heavy as their burdens.
Jo’s clarity is highly focused on family and her writing, with the advances of potential beau Laurie (Max Tachis) looking for ways to crack her mysterious exterior with minimal success. Affairs of the heart don’t come easy to her, but her abilities to friend zone Laurie is at peak levels.
The opening act does plenty of establishment, with the storyline having a joyous bent informed by the constant cheeriness of the Christmas season. But the giddiness that encompasses the warm home cannot sustain, and soon the girls are dealing with real world wartime issues, most notably Beth’s health challenges that put her on death’s doorstep.
The situations are heavy in Act 1, but never feel overwhelming from a storytelling standpoint. Yet the second act feels that there is a comfort and flow that makes for transcendent arcs to take root, with profound loss and transformative discoveries at its heart. These moments showcase Gunderson’s best, insightful wisdom that pairs beautifully with her penchant for writing alluring dialogue.
The production is a showcase of some scintillating acting choices, with both Stebbins and Tachis shaping the high-stakes storytelling within a scene that has plenty of savory twists and turns. This all takes place on Annie Smart’s specifically detailed scenic design, with a typical fantastic sound design from one of the area’s best, James Ard.
Both Tachis and Stebbins understand how to calibrate a beat and take a scene to its logical, heartbreaking conclusion, each performer ensuring their characters understand what could never happen between them, but fighting for it anyway. Just notice how badly Jo’s lips want to speak, and how badly Laurie wants to hear those words from his longtime friend, each forced to inhabit their own specific loneliness.
These affairs are small potatoes compared to the world being destroyed around them, with Beth’s illness a constant battle alongside the many ravages of the Civil War. But while the window has closed between Jo and Laurie, a scholarly awkward gentleman (George Psarras) possesses a key that will release Jo from her own reservations about love, her attraction built from his colorful and compelling mind.
“Little Women” possesses more at its core than just four charming young women gallivanting through their warm and sizable house as they giggle and frolic through the scent of yuletide. There is pain, loss, laughs and warmth. And by the conclusion of the story, there are many discoveries of love and triumph.
While the conflict compels and the men are off fighting the war, “Little Women” once again proves that the women were also pretty darn strong all along.
‘LITTLE WOMEN’
Through: Oct. 12
Where: Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro St., Mountain View
Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes with an intermission
Tickets: $44-$94; theatreworks.org
