The Heiress

April 18-20 and 25-27 at 7:30; April 21 and 28 at 2:00

By Ruth and Augustus Goetz
Based on Washington Square by Henry James
Directed by Steve Vineberg

The Goetzes turned Henry James’s celebrated late-nineteenth-century novella Washington Square into a classic American play. Set in the Manhattan of the 1840s, it is a psychological portrait of Catherine Sloper, a young woman of means whose shyness and awkwardness are a continual source of frustration for her widowed father, who still basks in his undimmed memories of her luminous, accomplished mother. When Catherine is courted by – and falls madly in love with – a handsome young man without money of his own, her father objects to the match on the grounds that her suitor can only be a fortune hunter. The play is an unusual and complex coming-of-age story about the consequences of living without love. Steve Vineberg directs.

The Department of Theatre and Dance