Ethan Frome
Book-It at the Intiman Playhouse, 325-6500, $19 general, various discounts for groups/seniors/students. Through Feb 10.

Closing this weekend and recommended, Ethan Frome offers a taste of hard times and winters even worse than our own. In this production, the Book-It company deftly evokes a hardscrabble New England town circa 1910, and employs (as always) intelligent, spare set design: tall, towering panels with black brush strokes resembling tree branches. A few significant props--like a steamer trunk, or a creaky Shaker rocking chair--both root the actors and allow them a world of space on the airy Intiman stage. Haunting music and vocals cocoon the actors further amid turn-of-the-century American/Puritan ambience.

Farmer Ethan Frome is unhappily married, and since divorce was a criminal shame 100 years ago, he can't leave his wife for the woman he really loves. The tale's three main characters (Ethan, his distinctly unfun wife, Zeena, and Zeena's vivacious cousin, Mattie) resonate vividly onstage, owing to adaptor Russ Banham's script, which retains the muscly and scrappy-comic elements of Edith Wharton's prose ("Ethan had the sense of having done something arch and ingenuous. To prolong the effect, he groped for a dazzling phrase, and brought out... 'Come along.'")

Too bad that Jane Jones' Zeena is dominated by caricature and an exaggeratedly hoarse voice that doesn't do justice to the colors of the character's hypochondria and rebuked loneliness. Jennifer Sue Johnson, in the difficult role of Mattie, at times weighs in too heavily on the wide-eyed side. But the Ethan Frome cast has a seemingly effortless focus and palpable commitment to this short shock of a tale by Wharton, which--in keeping with her other writings--lambastes social conventions and puritanical mores. The nearly primal love triangle of Ethan Frome is still riveting today, partly because social conventions still keep us from being "free." Wharton's icy tale makes you think of the under-wraps racism and class discrimination that thrives in 2002. STACEY LEVINE