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When playwright Lauren Gunderson was in middle school, a production of “Little Women” provided her one of her first acting opportunities.
“I played Jo March, of course,” she said with a laugh. “It just meant so much to me.” Since its publication more than a century ago, Louisa May Alcott’s semiautobiographical novel “Little Women” has become a coming-of-age classic and a source of numerous adaptations, from graphic novels to major motion pictures. Now, TheatreWorks Silicon Valley is presenting Gunderson’s own new stage version of the American Civil War-era tale.
TheatreWorks co-commissioned “Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women,” along with Northlight Theatre (Skokie, Illinois), City Theatre Company (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) and People’s Light (Malvern, Pennsylvania), and the show has been undergoing a rolling world premiere. When commissioning it, the theater companies were seeking “a version that felt like what they love about the book, which happened to align with what I loved,” Gunderson told this news organization.
“Little Women,” she said, remains evergreen and popular in part because of its representations of womanhood in different forms, and its portrayal of “ferocious sisterhood.”
“If you haven’t read it in a while, you might think it’s sort of a sweet, gentle, domestic story,” Gunderson said. “The truth is, these sisters are vivacious; they are rebellious; they are loving to each other but not always kind; they are spicy as hell.”
Of course the show features the March sisters – sensible Meg; daring Jo; shy Beth; and sassy Amy – and some of their other nearests and dearests. But Gunderson’s new play, as the title suggests, also introduces audiences to their creator, Alcott herself, on whom Jo was modeled. In TheatreWorks’ production, Elissa Beth Stebbins plays the dual role of Jo and Alcott.
“I always love things that give us a peek into the creative process. And so to get to know both Louisa and Jo, and the connection between the two of them, the ‘whys’ behind the creativity, the reasons she wrote it, and who she was as a person, that, to me, is just, it’s an added gift,” Stebbins said. “You get the story, and you get more.”
Stebbins has been a fan of “Little Women” since childhood, growing up in the South Bay watching the 1990s film version starring Winona Ryder. Coming from a large family herself, she will draw on that experience when portraying Alcott and her fictional counterpart.
“The story is wide; she gets to change, and the people around her get to change, and they get to learn and be complicated and make mistakes,” Stebbins said of Jo. “And the family dynamics are so beautiful.”
When taking on such a well-known character, “I can’t think about the way that people might come in with things they want, or how they’ve imagined her,” Stebbins said. “I just try as much as I can to bring my humanity to it, and that’s what’s going to ground it – not anyone else’s interpretation, not anyone else’s expectation, but, ‘What do I have in me that’s true in the same way that the character is true?'”
While as a writer Gunderson naturally relates to Jo, she said all the characters resonate. As a mother of two, she now sometimes sees herself in Marmee, the March family matriarch, in ways in which she never did in her younger days. She said she’s deeply enjoyed every previous adaptation she’s encountered, and when it came to creating her own, “I really wanted it to be spicy, and moving, and I wanted it to be romantic and enchanting. It needed to be all those things to feel like it was worthy of adapting again,” she said. She also wanted to highlight the text itself, by including not just dialogue from the book but some internal exposition as well.
“We get access to this interiority that Louisa May Alcott writes so beautifully and, frankly, humorously and sarcastically,” she said. “I really wanted to honor the literary quality that you would miss if you weren’t reading the book. There is a great responsibility to tell it accurately but also uniquely.”
The chemistry in a company is essential to any show, but perhaps especially to a close-knit family story like “Little Women,” and Stebbins, who works with TheatreWorks frequently, including in a production of Gunderson and Margot Melcon’s “Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley” last year, said she was looking forward to reuniting with some cast members and working with others for the first time. The rest of the cast includes Emily Ota, Lauren Hart, Sharon Shao, Cathleen Riddley, Max Tachis and George Psarras, with TheatreWorks’ Artistic Director Giovanna Sardelli at the helm as director.
Gunderson, according to American Theatre magazine, has been one of the nation’s most-produced playwrights in the past decade (Mountain View’s Pear Theatre will stage her “Ada and the Engine,” about Ada Lovelace, in November). She’s recently relocated to the United Kingdom for the next few years but was long based in San Francisco and looks forward to continuing her relationship with TheatreWorks.
“TheatreWorks is one of my Bay Area homes and champions, so I’m ever excited and ever grateful to work there,” she said.
Her plays often involve interesting and strong characters from literature or history, and said she hopes audiences leave her plays feeling like they’ve learned something and wanting to learn more, making “Little Women” a fitting addition to her body of work.
“I love theater that sort of does two things. One, time travel. We get to go across centuries … I love theater that transports,” she said. “I also love theater that centers women in complexity. That’s part of why I love this story. Every sister is so different from each other but you see them in each other as well.”
“Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women,” Sept. 24-Oct. 10, at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro St., Mountain View; $49-$89; theatreworks.org.
