LONG, sprawling sagas used to be the norm on stage. Then the Victorian novel took them over and plays became interior, short, private.
When Dickens’ “Nicholas Nickleby” was dramatized in 1982, it combined the two. The result was a breath of fresh air – theater with a narrative sweep.
Now comes a successor of sorts to “Nickleby” in “The Cider House Rules, Part One: Here in St. Cloud’s” – based on John Irving’s novel about a Maine doctor and his apprentice.
The play spans decades (Part One goes from the 1920s to the 1940s) and is enacted on stage in a mix of recited narrative and dialogue.
John Arnone’s ingeniously flexible set can be, in a trice, any place; the 19 actors bustle about, playing multiple roles.
It fits that a Dickens dramatization should have birthed this kind of play, since Irving’s book is a kind of homage to/parody of Dickens. We open with the birth of his hero, Homer Wells, to a nameless woman in busy St. Cloud’s orphanage, run by Doctor Wilbur Larch.
Little Homer, played throughout by a brilliant Josh Hamilton, gets farmed out at first to foster families. They’re at worst cruel, like the Christian (booo!) clan that forces the kids to repeat “I am vile, and I loathe myself,” and at best weird, like the outdoorsy couple who manage to get themselves killed.
Homer keeps returning to St. Cloud’s and Wilbur, his real home and father.
Wilbur is not just your kindly country doc; he’s a pioneer abortionist. Tendentiously, Irving has Wilbur justify his practices both in argument and in flashback narrative to the slums North Boston, where the young doc saw 13-year-olds pregnant “as a result of incest or rape.”
Wilbur is an odd bird, an ether addict (he needs the stuff to bear all the suffering he sees) whose entire sex life consisted of a quick coupling, arranged by his father, with a prostitute.
Irving unreservedly adores Wilbur; it’s left to Irish actor Colm Meaney, so fine in the movie “The Commitments,” to humanize the man. Troubled, sad, brooding, Meaney’s Wilbur is a figure of worry, weight and secret sorrow.
Just when it looks as if “Cider” is going to be merely an abortionist revision of “Dr. Kildare,” things go haywire. Homer bonds with a feral, shorts-wearing, angry, beefy, savage young girl/woman and fellow orphan, Melony (the fearless, manically inspired Jillian Armenante, in the evening’s third great performance).
Homer’s second great awakening comes when he realizes what’s going on at St. Cloud’s and refuses to participate. He sees personhood and “expression” in the fetuses and declares, “I won’t perform an abortion … I have a choice, too.”
This comes after an intense father-son, master-apprentice scene between Homer and Wilbur, and before Wilbur painfully lets Homer go off to see life.
“Cider” started at the Seattle Repertory, where director Jane Jones likes “transforming great literature into great theater through preservation of the author’s narrative voice.”
Jones and actor Tom Hulce conceived and skillfully directed the project; playwright Peter Parnell did the actual adaptation.
Although I partially resist Irving’s smart toying with Dickens and with life, I can’t wait to see what happens in Part Two of this compellingly staged story.
Atlantic Theater Company, 336 W. 20th St., (212) 239-6200.