^{Brenda Withers and Jonathan Fielding
Photo: Edward Boches}

Review by Lee Roscoe

Brenda Withers adapted, directed, and stars in The Bohemian, alongside fellow Harbor Stage Company stalwart Jonathan Fields. This piece is for those who love a bedtime story or are fans of the great novelist, Willa Cather, as The Bohemian is one of her short stories, published in 1912.

The set is a kitchen rimmed with living wheat, which has just been threshed. In the beginning, Withers, who with Fielding narrates the story and plays multiple characters, washes her hands, and scoops out flour and begins to knead it. The ritual of the baking of bread bookends the play, with the finished loaf appearing towards the end. 

Nils Ericson (Fielding) uprooted himself from the earth and the farming life, for the sea, but he is called home by a certain longing and nostalgia to his stoic mother, his little brother Eric, his older brother Olaf, and his former sweetheart, now married to Olaf, Clara (Withers). She is the Bohemian in the piece, in the literal old-fashioned meaning of a Hungarian. But he is a bohemian in his escape from the quotidian. He challenges Clara to leave what he calls her bitterness and bite, to re-find her delight—something wild like the beating heart of a bird.

As we spend time with various members of the small community, portrayed by the two actors, we are transported to an earlier 20th century and yet something universal and eternal, as we wait to see how the relationships between family members develop—and whether Clara will decide to escape her cage.

Withers narrates and plays the characters of the mother and of Clara with a mannered, staccato, monotonal and understated style. There’s not much emotional content to the women, but then perhaps that is who they are. The characters Fielding narrates and plays include Nils, Clara’s father, and even a few women. Many of these are more alive and less taciturn than the characters played by Withers.

Withers has made some odd directorial choices: though she narrates that the mother is knitting, instead, she does not knit but pares what appear to be strawberries for a jam she will cook.  And though there are moments when one wishes for a regular play—to see characters engage more fully with each other in conflict and resolution, nonetheless what we do get is haunting, in large part due to Cather’s meltingly perceptive descriptions as with “the smell of dust and sunflowers” of the air there, or that Olaf’s personality is like “wet loam.” Cather’s immortal language richly captures farming country in the Midwest, its pull often in conflict with the life of those who live upon that land, with its repetition of chores, making butter, milking, breeding children, the boredom, and yet incredibly important work which farmers do.

The Bohemian is performed Wednesdays through Saturdays, 7 p.m. and Sundays, 5 p.m. through July 5, at Harbor Stage, 15 Kendrick Ave., Wellfleet. Friday, June 20, is a pay-what-you-can-night. For tickets ($25 – $50) and information call 508.349.6800 or visit harborstage.org.