The Wharton One-Acts: The Mission of Jane and The Promise

After a three year absence, Shakespeare & Company’s popular Wharton One-Acts return to the stage with two Edith Wharton adaptations, The Mission of Jane and The Promise, running in Spring Lawn Theatre’s rotating repertory. Both plays are directed by Eleanor Holdridge and adapted by Dennis Krausnick.

The Mission of Jane

Alice and Julian Lethbury are a very conventional couple in a relationship devoid of surprise and passion. They seldom meet, except at the dinner table, where Alice reveals to her husband her desperate longing for something to fill up her meaningless days. She has come across Jane, an abandoned orphan baby, and she presses her husband to adopt her. Julian agrees. For the next 20 years, over the family dinner table, we follow the Lethburys’ journey as they wrestle with the trials of their adopted daughter – who has grown into a bossy, dictatorial, and difficult woman.

The Promise (from Wharton’s Les Metteurs en Scene)

Blanche Lambert, a sophisticated, adventurous, and money-less American woman, and Jean de Fanois, a charming French aristocrat who has gambled away his fortune, are partners in enterprise. Thriving on their ability to circulate freely among a privileged class and glittering society where others foot the bill, Blanche and Jean make ends meet by arranging marriages between very rich Americans who want entree into the Old World aristocracy, and Europeans desperate to marry into American money to repair their crumbling way of life. Yet for all of their successes, the two match-makers find they are running short of money, and out of time.