THE STORY: As told by Gilbert Gabriel in the New York Journal-American, the play concerns “farmer Ethan Frome, his complaining wife Zenobia, and her young kinswoman and house-drudge Mattie Silver. And of Ethan’s and Mattie’s awkward, hide-bound passion in the face of Zenobia’s dreary orders, and of how desperately the two of them, entwined in a first and last rapture, ride down the hill on a crazy snow sled to meet death against a tree. But…they didn’t…in the book, neither do they here. Here’s the same awful and ironic epilogue, the same ogre’s thumb of actuality brought crushing down on the two runaways and reducing them instead to maimed resentful invalids under the wife’s care for twenty shabby years to come. A more devastating end no play has dared to have hereabouts in ages…or since the theatre insists on tall effectiveness, a more effective one either."
Dramatization of the famous Edith Wharton novel.
