‘The Bridge of San Luis Rey’ Review: Occasional Pleasures, Persistent Wariness

We are meant, in these fictional explorations, I think, to feel a bit overwhelmed by both creators’ self-conscious enterprise, and even to feel a bit of vertigo at the vistas of eccentricity, ego and earnestness being portrayed. As Wilder himself said in a 1916 letter: “The art of writing is a matter of alpine climbing—peak to peak, and let the chasms snatch the fearful.”

So give Mr. Greenspan considerable credit for his venturesome daring: adapting a novel that Wilder thought beyond the reach of the stage. It still is, I believe. The effort doesn’t collapse, but it does creak, its occasional pleasures accompanied by persistent wariness.

Mr. Greenspan begins coyly, himself appearing in street clothes before a suitably aged proscenium, introducing himself as stage director (which he is), as actor (playing Uncle Pio—a peculiar pedant and unsavory mentor to the greatest Spanish actress of the age), and as omnipresent stage manager (thus paying homage to Wilder’s “Our Town”).

He is also a somewhat frenetic guide through the interactions of the nine actors. All but Pio appear in full costume with minimal stage apparatus; character and image are meant to loom large, not spectacle. Those doomed include Uncle Pio, accompanied by a young boy about to become his ward (though he is, as in the novel, a mere stick figure—or rather, as seen here, a stuffed featureless puppet).

More vivid among the living dead is Doña Maria (played by Mary Lou Rosato ), an aged noblewoman called “the laughingstock of all of Lima” who is accompanied, in death as in life, by her convent-trained companion, Pepita (Sumaya Bouhbal). One young man, Esteban ( Zachary Infante ), nearly hangs himself over the diseased tortuous death of his twin brother, Manuel ( Bradley James Tejeda ); he is rescued by a ship captain (played along with other roles by Steven Rattazzi ), only to plunge along with the others into the ravine.

Bradley James Tejeda, Elizabeth Ramos and Zachary Infante Photo: T. Charles Erickson

The characters impinging on the thwarted loves of the five condemned include Doña Clara ( Madeline Wise ), the coldhearted daughter of Doña Maria; Madre María ( Julienne Hanzelka Kim ), the driven and compassionate abbess of the convent that schooled two of the dead; and Camila Perichole ( Elizabeth Ramos ), a stunning, spoiled actress who is central to the stories of the condemned.

That’s a lot to compress into 90 minutes, and it feels it. But one of the play’s most unconvincing changes was to eliminate Wilder’s Franciscan missionary, Brother Juniper, who seeks to discern a divine plan in this catastrophe; he later pays with his own life for the heresy of asking if we are like the flies boys kill on a summer day (as Wilder puts it) or like the sparrows who “do not lose a feather that has not been brushed by the finger of God.”

Mr. Greenspan has set up the play, though, so the audience is meant to take on Brother Juniper’s project. But such secular questioning is of a different order than Brother Juniper’s; it dismisses the very question he asks. Even the novel gives us no apparent answer beyond the narrator’s persistent attempt to read the “notation of the heart” in these characters. The play leaves us with still less. We follow a course that promises to lead us somewhere but instead remains hanging in midair.

We are supposed to embrace, perhaps, the much-quoted closing lines of the book (paraphrased in the play) in which the abbess seems to explain the book’s metaphor: “There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.” But here Wilder leaps at a satisfying metaphor that is itself frayed: The bridge is love—and it breaks? These characters, heading for death, are sustained by…love? It is the living who snatch at such comforting significance that is, in truth, unsupported by both play and novel. Neither lets us reach the other side.

—Mr. Rothstein is the Journal’s Critic at Large.