For fans of British farce and the Wodehouse pair, this will be a lovely treat.   For those who are less familiar and planning to see the show, you might pop into your local library and check out a P.G. Wodehouse novel.

air warning: this is a play that will be difficult for parents to watch. Knowing how our actions can affect our children permanently and profoundly is difficult for many to swallow. While the scenario presented here is extreme and (I presume) fictitious, it still demonstrates how what we do in front of our children will shape who they become. And often few people want to take on the burden of that kind of responsibility.

Hartford Stage’s final offering for its 2017/18 season, A Lesson from Aloes by Athol Fugard, has a setting that is at once dated and timely: during Apartheid in South Africa. For those unfamiliar with Apartheid, it was a legal system instituted after World War II to suppress nonwhite citizens of South Africa; think of it as a combination of the Jim Crow laws against the Blacks in America’s southern states and the Nuremburg laws against the Jews in Germany. It was an oppressive, extreme form of racism and social injustice, finally lifted in 1994, after negotiations following the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990.

When I heard that Hartford Stage was putting an Edith Wharton novel on stage, I jumped for joy. Wharton was one of my favorite novelists in my late teens and early twenties. Having started with Ethan Frome in high school, I quickly devoured her other novels and short stories. I found her descriptions of beautiful, rich interiors and high society manners engrossing, mostly due to my interest in historical fiction at the time. I also adored the tragedy that befell on her characters, and the sacrifices made by them (usually for love – because I was a typical swooning young woman at the time). For me, film adaptations vary from excellent (House of Mirth with Gillian Anderson) to mediocre (Age of Innocence with Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Winona Ryder), but lucky for us, Douglas McGrath’s smart, concise adaptation of Age of Innocence definitely leans toward the former: It is a worthy reworking of Wharton’s Pulitzer-prize winning novel with standout performances and stunning staging.