Bronte Remy Bumppo Theatre Company
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Theirs is a story tailor-made for drama: God on one side, nature on the other, and a singular trio of authoresses—plus their troubled only brother—in between. The sisters quietly defied the conventions of 1840s England (when women were barred from using the the Bronte’s local library) by creating two of the most memorable novels in the canon, Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, with its fearsome “madwoman in the attic,” and Wuthering Heights (which received perhaps the greatest compliment any British novel can earn: a Monty Python parody, in which the doomed lovers, Catherine and Heathcliff, proclaim their undying passion for each other via semaphore). Baby Anne usually gets short shrift, but her protofeminist novel about a woman fleeing an abusive marriage, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, has found its own adherents in recent decades. No wonder the Brontes continue to exert a pull on the popular imagination.
Mostly it seems the subject matter overwhelmed Teale. John O’Keefe, another playwright obsessed with the family, penned a biodrama also entitled Bronte, which I saw in a production at San Francisco’s Magic Theatre in 2000. Like this one, that play contained a surfeit of detail. But O’Keefe managed to capture the delicate admixture of outsize imagination, longing, and mordant wit at the heart of the sisters’ best writing. Teale never achieves a similar distillation.
The worst decision Teale makes is to incorporate the characters of Catherine and Bertha, both played by Linda Gillum. It’s a thankless task that mostly requires Gillum to crawl around the stage looking like a wild-haired vampiric wraith out of an Edvard Munch painting. This device reduces the sisters’ layered and philosophically meditative writings to cliches of gothic insanity.
