What drew you to this story? Why Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence?

I wrote a play many years ago called The Book Club Play where each scene is about a different book the club is reading. The second episode is about The Age of Innocence. And the man who never reads, reads the book—and it completely transforms his life. A friend of mine, after seeing it, asked about adapting The Age of Innocence for the stage. And it really made me think about how to make that happen.

What were some of the challenges that this particular novel presented for adaptation?

It’s almost unadaptable! But I felt that the first woman to win a Pulitzer definitely deserved a little bit more love. The book is so witty. Edith Wharton is so biting. She doesn’t let anyone get away with anything, which I love. The thing that really spoke to me was that it’s about a young, foreign woman who comes into society and is both revered and destroyed for being different. I just found that to be such a compelling and interesting story.

What makes this story a particularly good fit for the stage?

One thing that stood out to me about the book is that the characters are constantly going to the opera and plays. And I realized that a lot of the book is about the idea of how we perform our lives. So much of being human in society is about performance. When are you real, and when do you turn that on? I think it will be a fascinating meta-theatrical moment to watch the characters watch these dramatic scenes, knowing they are feeling the emotions but are unable to express themselves because of the societal expectations that trap them.

What about this story do you feel speaks to an audience in 2024?

When I do an adaptation, I always think: why are we putting it onstage? Why now? And I was very intrigued by the similarities to today’s society. This story is about being ostracized and rejected by society. Everybody is worrying about what everybody else thinks of them, and there is real power in that to do damage. There’s also a conversation in this piece about how even though women are more controlled by these societies, those restrictions hurt men too.

I think a lot of people have focused on plot in this play. But I think it’s all about the characters and the circumstances. So understanding the context, understanding things like the fact that a man calling a married woman by her first name is super intimate, is central to appreciating the stakes of the story. One of the main challenges for me was both knowing the rules and then teaching the rules in a way that’s fun for the audience, because so much has changed since the Gilded Age.

What do you think of the central love triangle of the piece?

I think you should not underestimate anybody in that love triangle. That is my warning. And I think it’s interesting to think about, at the end of the play, who ends up being unhappy and who ends up being happy. Newland talks a lot about trying to have the flower of life, which is loving your life and having choices and agency. And I do hope that audiences walk away from the play feeling they have had the flower of life, but I don’t think all our characters have. 

Photo: Playwright Karen Zacarías in rehearsals for The Age of Innocence at The Old Globe. Photo by Rita Corona.