The Old Globe’s season of Pulitzer Prize winners kicks off with The Age of Innocence, based on Edith Wharton’s novel that won the prize in 1921. In the Sheryl and Harvey White Theatre next door is the 2023 winner of the Pulitzer for Drama, English, and here on the Donald and Darlene Shiley Stage this spring will be the 2022 winner for Drama, Fat Ham. Since its founding in 1935, The Old Globe has been a theatre that has venerated writers. Perhaps that’s unsurprising given that we’re a Shakespeare company. The caliber of Shakespeare’s writing continues to inspire the playwrights who cross our threshold to work toward the highest expression of theatre art.

The Age of Innocence has proven remarkably durable since its 1920 publication. It’s never been out of print. There’ve been three film adaptations, the first one silent and the most recent made by one of the giants of contemporary cinema, Martin Scorsese. There’ve been three stage adaptations, too; the Globe’s is number four. And Wharton’s imagined 1870s New York City has in a very real sense come to define how we imagine that period in our country’s history. The hit TV series “The Gilded Age” owes a huge debt to the novel. That show’s creator, Julian Fellowes, claims it was his exposure to Edith Wharton in his 30s that made him turn to writing. “Her dialogue was so immediate,” Fellowes says, “her understanding of emotional predicaments was so vital. She observes but she does not judge.” He calls her prose style “a miracle.”

Karen Zacarías would agree, I think. Globe audiences know this increasingly influential American playwright from her scathingly hilarious Native Gardens some seasons ago, and from last season’s just-plain-hilarious Destiny of Desire. We commissioned her to write a new play for our biggest stage, and she came back to us with Edith Wharton. The two writers make a great match. Wharton is renowned not only for her astute psychological insight but also for her command of structure, pace, and tone. Like her, Zacarías also demonstrates remarkable control of her medium. There’s nothing out of place in her work, nothing extraneous. Every detail in her language and stagecraft keeps the story tight, the momentum building, and the story central. And like Wharton, Zacarías knows how to write about heartbreak, about the exquisite and unbearable ache that overwhelms when love goes unrequited, or unconsummated, or gets blocked by some irrational and immovable force.

This ache is Wharton’s subject. She’s interested in the customs and mores of America’s aristocracy, to be sure, and marriage and money are fascinations. But what powers her writing is her anger at the severe restrictions and repressions that make scandal the main preoccupation of all her New Yorkers, and its avoidance the primary motivator of their every single social interaction. The innocence in her title is ironic; it’s a put-on, a lid on a boiling pot of emotion and desire. When it cracks under the strain, what it’s been holding back explodes outward with violence and pain. The love triangle among Newland Archer, Countess Olenska, and May Welland has all the appearances of a 19th-century melodrama, but in Wharton’s hands, it’s something else entirely: an indictment of a society in which class, status, and duty suffocate the simple and pure truth of the heart.

Zacarías focuses keenly on this essential facet of Wharton’s novel, and amplifies another of its themes: the agency of women in the patriarchal world of New York’s Gilded Age. Through artful shifts of emphasis and even through the careful construction of her adaptation, Zacarías subtly moves the women to its center. Other takes on the novel focus mainly on Archer’s story; this stage version is keenly interested in Ellen, May, and even, in a fascinating sense, Edith Wharton herself. This is a brilliant move by Zacarías, an act almost of resuscitation that to me makes this one of the most exciting literary adaptations I’ve read in years, and a work I’m proud to have on the Globe’s stage.

I’m grateful to Chay Yew, the visionary director who’s become a good friend of the Globe since he was here with last season’s Dishwasher Dreams, for his careful shepherding of Zacarías’s play and his truly profound and elegant physical production. I’m also grateful to a really top-shelf group of actors and designers for bringing their hearts to this work. And I must acknowledge the Globe’s own Danielle Mages Amato and Sonia Desai, our magnificent literary department, for their generous and generative insights that have nurtured this project for nearly four years from its inception to its opening night. They’ve done something major here, and I’m grateful.

Thanks for coming. Enjoy the show.