Classroom curricula usually group E.M. Forster with the Victorians, ignoring the undercurrent of imminent social upheaval simmering below the surface of the complacent universe that preceded the irreversible destruction of World War One. This time, however, when a London "bluestocking"—a word coined during the period—remarks upon the "crowds of people, all in a hurry" proliferating the urban landscape, there is no danger of our misapprehending the scope of her observation: not only do a gallery of period photographs acquaint us with exactly what they looked like, but scene changes are executed by clusters of black-clad trilby-hatted umbrella and suitcase-bearing kokens who shift furniture to represent, among other locales, a noisy smoke-spewing automobile of the sort that will someday dominate the peaceful countryside. This is precisely the kind of literary project that Remy Bumppo Theatre does best. Chicago Author/Adapter Douglas Post's concise text compresses Forster's backstory-choked Edwardian yarn to a brisk two-and-a-half hours, while director Nick Sandys keeps the traffic patterns fluid and stage picture uncluttered in Theater Wit's tiny studio space, making for a constant flow of dramatic action. The technical values likewise reflect individualized detail, from Eva Brenneman's razor-edged dialects, to Christopher Kriz’s timeline score of curtain music, to Kristy Leigh Hall's character-revealing wardrobe (our final glimpse of the liberal-minded Schlegel sisters, for example, shows the more domestic of the two wearing the fashions of her older husband's generation, while her progressive sibling is dressed in the manner of the modern artists congregating in Munich.) In an age like ours, where civilization as we know it seems to be disintegrating beneath our very feet, what better way to start the season than with a portrait of another age peopled with citizens teetering nervously on the brink of internal realignment, and with it, a lesson in how to survive its inevitability.
