Naomi Iizuka Pins Her "Scarlet Letter" on Single Motherhood

Izabel Mar as Pearl and Zabryna Guevara as Hester (Photo: Chris Bennion)

“I learned about my family in bits and pieces,” playwright Naomi Iizuka said in an interview. “There are things that still peek out in the telling, like my father’s sister will tell me something he neglected.”

Similarly, you only get bits and pieces of Hawthorne’s story in her play The Scarlet Letter, showing at Intiman Theatre (through December 5).

Audiences I think would be better served by knowing that Iizuka’s work is to Hawthorne’s as Kaufman’s Adaptation is to The Orchid Thief. (Except that Iizuka’s adaptation runs just over 70 minutes; you’ve hardly sat down, it seems, when everything is all done.) In both cases, the adapting author has introduced a significant personal element into the source. Here, that includes a paraphrasing of that “bits and pieces” line by the adult Pearl (Renata Friedman) who introduces and narrates the proceedings.

It’s not a satisfying reworking, in that it hardly improves upon the original, and never makes a bold claim for its new existence–just like the little Pearl in the play who would like to be noticed but doesn’t realize the attention the town fathers pay her is not for her sake.

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Rather than a Puritan costume drama, what you see is a sort of memory play–part imagination, part hallucination–in which Pearl tries to recover her father, and make peace with the choices her mother made. (Tangentially, I direct you to Susan Faludi’s “Feminism’s ritual matricide.”) Where Hawthorne’s story is driven by Hester’s conflict with Puritan society, Iizuka’s play is not driven much at all, though it pretends to be (by a repressed memory that arrives right on cue).

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Peter Ksander’s beautifully austere set, lit by Justin Townsend, features a wooden square backed by a row of white birches that immediately suggest bars. There’s also a wooden scaffold, in which the disgraced Hester (Zabryna Guevara), babe in arms, faces down her would-be tormentors, railing loudly in defiance, and refusing to name the father.

R. Hamilton Wright as Chillingsworth and Frank Boyd as Dimmesdale (Photo: Chris Bennion)

Director Lear deBessonet supports Iizuka’s disjunctive adaptation–in which people with the names of Hawthorne’s characters appear and have abstracted, present-day conversations and conflicts–by having the townsmen (Mark Anders, Jose Gonzales) play townswomen, too. They gossip and criticize Hester, sometimes comically. (The presence of a roving violinist, Emily Holden, is unexplained, but the music is nice.)

Iizuka’s language, too, has little in common with Hawthorne’s novel. Here’s one of Hawthorne’s righteous battle-axes:

This woman has brought shame upon us all, and ought to die. Is there not law for it? Truly, there is, both in the Scripture and the statute-book. Then let the magistrates, who have made it of no effect, thank themselves if their own wives and daughters go astray!

Iizuka’s townswomen might call Hester a hussy and whore, but they are bitchily impotent, and register less and less as the play moves along. It’s only when they aren’t there (a scrim falls) and disembodied voices insult and attack Hester, that their wounding presence is recast in a way that retains the sense of danger.

But otherwise, the dramatic stakes are reduced, again and again, in episodic “bits.” Hester argues with her once-lost husband Chillingworth (R. Hamilton Wright) as if he’s an almost-ex who won’t sign divorce papers, adult Pearl challenges Hester about being a cowardly, codependent woman, and young free-thinking Pearl (Izabel Mar) spouts off at every turn to everyone. When she and Hester get hauled before the town fathers, it feels like a parent-teacher conference indictment of single moms. In an exception, Chillingworth’s preying on Pastor Dimmesdale (Frank Boyd) is grimly sublimated aggression, and its pathological nature culminates in a startling fever-dream image.