Shakespeare & Company, Lenox, MA, October 9, 2004 (single performance)

Reviewed by Shel Horowitz, Editor, Global Arts Review

Shakespeare & Company's Autum Gala, "Hawthorne Revisited," brought a glittering crowd to see CBS's Mike Wallace and celebrity actors Jane Fonda, David Strathairn, and Marisa Tomei to Tanglewood's elegant Ozawa Hall for a celebration of the life and work of Hawthorne.

Director (and company founder) Tina Packer, in her opening remarks, said Hawthorne "could be said to have invented the American novel," and producer Gordon Hyatt called him "the only American author who has never been out of fashion."

The piece, which took Hyatt two years to create, mixed biographical sketches, readings from Hathorne's most famous works, The Scarlet Letter (as adapted for the stage by psychologist Carol Gilligan) and The House of the Seven Gables, and an excerpt from "A Tanglewood Tale," a play by Juliane Hiam Glantz and Stephan Glantz about Hawthorne's friendship with another Berkshire writer, Herman Melville.

Some of his letters were quoted, too, including o letter to his mother, where the 17-year-old Hawthorne laments, "Oh, that I were rich enough to live without a profession!" He considers and dismisses such careers as ministry, law, and medicine, then asks his mother what she thinks of writing as a career. He notes wryly, "the illegibility of my handwriting is very author-like."

The evening also gave a context for Hawthorne's ability to create a strong female protagonist. Even after prison, after seven years of wearing the scarlet A on her chest, Hester Prynne, she is proud of acting form love, and acts from love and strength once more at the book's conclusion.

This portrayal didn't appear in a vacuum. Hawthorne's artist wife Sophia and her sisters were strong women who broke out of the confines of their repressive era. They were active in educational reform and other social causes--one of them starting the first kindergarten in America and the other going off to rural Ohio with her husband, Horace Mann, to found Antioch, the first college to accept women and blacks as full and equal students alongside white men.

And perhaps this strong protagonist was a part of the book's success, and the founding of Hawthorne's reputation. The book sold its first two printings in ten days and three days, respectively, and is still required reading in high school classrooms across the land. Such authors as John Updike, Stephen King, and Philip Roth are among many who've acknowledged a debt to this icon of American literature.

Shel Horowitz, Editor of Global Travel Review and owner of FrugalFun.com, is the author of the e-book, The Penny-Pinching Hedonist: How to Live Like Royalty with a Peasant's Pocketbook, and the creator of the Ethical Business Pledge campaign.

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