Little Women, big family

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This article was published 20/11/2024 (364 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When the self-described “super-short” Katie German was even littler, she was cast in a fringe production of Louisa May Alcott’s revolutionary American novel as one of the March women. Not Amy or Beth or Jo or Meg, but as a 15-year-old Marmee, the matriarch charged with keeping her daughters on a peaceful path while their father is away fighting a war described oxymoronically as civil.

“That was I think the first time I came in contact with the text and then in the ’90s there was the Winona Ryder version and I fell in love with that,” says German, who’s making her Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre directorial debut with Little Women, opening Thursday.

On the John Hirsch Mainstage, an entirely local cast will portray the residents of Concord, Mass., with Bailey Chin (Jo), Ava Darrach-Gagnon (Meg), Julia Davis (Beth) and Megan Fry (Amy) playing the March sisters.

Instead of reprising her teenage role of Marmee, German will cede that honour to Jan Skene.

It’s been 30 years since Ryder played Jo, five since director Greta Gerwig put her own modern ballroom twirl on Alcott’s characters and 156 since the author born in Germantown, Penn., put pen to paper, never expecting that her debut novel, published by the Roberts Brothers company, would mean much of anything to anybody.

“(Publisher) Mr. (Thomas) Niles wants a girls’ story, and I begin Little Women,” she wrote in May 1868, her words collected in Ednah D. Cheney’s Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters and Journals, published in 1889 and shared online in excerpts by the New York Public Library in 2015. “Marmee, Anna (basis for Meg) and May (basis for Amy) all approve my plan. So I plod away, though I don’t enjoy this sort of thing. Never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters; but our queer plays and experiences may prove interesting, though I doubt it.”

Later, Alcott made an addendum to that entry: “Good joke.”

The hunger for the debut novel was so strong the first edition’s run of 2,000 sold out in two weeks, with Alcott’s editor requesting a second volume by spring, causing the author to consider her characters’ futures.

“Girls write to ask who the little women marry, as if that was the only end and aim of a woman’s life,” Alcott wrote 156 Novembers ago. “I won’t marry Jo to Laurie to please anyone.” (Matthew Fletcher plays him onstage.)

Alcott herself never married or had children, but is still talked about 136 years after her death in 1888.

When she got the gig, German reacquainted herself with the novel and Alcott’s world, surprised to find how much she remembered from the author’s rich rendering of a distant era that quite often feels reflective of more recent times.

“Some of these stories and situations are so ingrained. When Jo burns Meg’s hair off, and when Amy gets strapped for bringing pickled limes to school,” says German, who recalls her own girlhood shenanigans every day in rehearsal.

“In Grade 2, I started a petition because I found out a teacher was leaving and I didn’t think that was a good idea. Also my sister and I spent an hour covering our neighbours’ wall with mud. I think that was the only time we got grounded. We also threw berries out the window at people who were biking and my dad couldn’t figure out why people kept looking angry at us when we drove by — and then he caught us whipping chokecherries at them.”

Decades later, German offers her apologies to the residents of Charleswood for the pelting.

That type of sibling and familial interplay — where families get reputations for certain behaviours or attributes — is certainly something to which people of any gender can relate, German believes.

“We fought, we yelled at each other, but we were the first people to defend each other, too,” she says.

The director says that type of bonding has happened naturally in the rehearsal hall, where over the course of three weeks, the 14-person cast and extensive crew have engaged in spirited discussion and a good deal of hijinks while focusing on the task at hand: bringing Canadian playwright Jordi Mand’s literary adaptation, first performed at the Stratford Festival, to Manitoba audiences.

A team effort is necessary to accomplish that, says German, adding that she easily could have cast this show “9,000 times over” given the number of local actors who threw their hats in the ring.

As expected from a period comedy such as Little Women, the costume department, led by designer Joseph Abetria, did a lot of heavy lifting when it came to adding to the show’s core message of societal change and defiant individualism. The set, designed by Jawon Kang, functions at times like a viewfinder, or a Victorian tunnel postcard, bringing the audience into the story, which German says is literary through and through.

“This is a story about books, right?” she asks.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com