Obvious Script Spoils Solid Acting in Forgettable ‘Ice Glen’

Joan Ackermann’s “Ice Glen,” directed by Barbara Oliver and running at the Aurora Theatre Company until Dec. 10, isn’t about ice or a glen. It isn’t about lust, it isn’t about love, it isn’t even about the bear featured prominently on the production’s publicity materials. “Ice Glen” is about a poet’s artistic guardedness, and, for better or for worse, that’s pretty much it.

The year is 1917 and Sarah Harding, played by Zehra Berkman, is a poet and the resident gardener at Stonegate, an estate in the Berkshires. Sarah wears boots and riding pants and has the characteristic unkempt bun that visually signals her incarnation of the unconventional and creative one-ness with nature. To make sure these points comes across, Sarah is attacked by a bear before the beginning of the first scene and is carried onstage, still, silent and facially wounded (naturally) before she begins to laugh through her pain (unconventionally) on a divan. Thusly does the play commence in medias res with a certain disregard for symbolic finesse that pervades the rest of the production.

As is the case with most period comedies about the era, the newly-widowed spouse has just discovered that her late husband spent most of her family’s fortune before his untimely demise. Dulce Bainbridge, played with an inherently watchable refinement by Lauren Grace, struggles to maintain the crumbling manor while jovial employees fix leaks and a houseboy someone found orphaned after a fire milks a dog. Mrs. Roswell, the cook, is played by Jessica Powell with effortless comic ability, and brings a unique perspective to what could have been a caricature, as does Julian Lopez-Morillas in the role of Grayson, a butler and advisor.

This happy picture of domestic decline is disturbed by the arrival of Peter Woodburn, the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, played with an appropriate amount of alacrity by Marvin C. Greene. Dulce, the mistress of the house, sees an opportunity to escape the country life she appropriately terms "exceedingly dull" with this Boston publication knight on the horse of his cosmopolitan career. She wants to wear a fancy dress to impress him at dinner, but, of course, it’s moth-eaten by time, poverty and a playwright who lacks subtlety, and any affair that begins with a moth-eaten dress can’t end well. Silk purse, sow’s ear, ad nauseum, ad infinitum—though the costume itself is beautiful.

The purpose of Woodburn’s visit, however, is to persuade the unconventional Sarah to allow him to publish her poems in his magazine. What ensues is the actual conflict of a play that would initially have you believe the problem exists solely in a love triangle between Dulce, Woodburn and Sarah. This tension is within Sarah herself, between the necessity of her work’s public exposure and her desire for personal privacy.

Sarah’s subsequent struggle is difficult to watch, which can be at least partially attributed to the character’s possible narcissism. Rather than appreciate Woodburn, who has memorized three of her poems, she admonishes him for doing so and threatens to call a lawyer and prosecute him for theft. This strangely contemporary theme of intellectual property is underscored with a heavy hand by Grayson’s collection of archaeological materials. He cleans them for a purpose that remains unclear, but he refuses to give them to a museum. In his mind, they belong to nature, just as Sarah feels her poems do.

Like most of the events that preceded it, the play’s conclusion is not entirely surprising, and in the end we’re left with one ice glen, a little bit of love, some lust, fevered poetic protection, and the pointed lack of a bear. And that’s pretty much it.

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