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On Portland’s poet

ARMS AND THE MAN: Playwright Daniel Noel as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

It’s a testament to the esteem the playwright holds for this subject and era that Longfellow is composed entirely of the words of the poet and his contemporaries. For more than four years, Noel has been busy in the libraries of Portland, Bowdoin, and Cambridge, poring through and culling from voluminous historical documents. He has woven that material — which includes excerpts from Longfellow’s letters and journals, as well as his verse — into a narrative that spans the scope of the poet’s life, starting with his youngest days of frolicking around Deering Oaks.

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Along the way, we meet a rich variety of Longfellow’s intimates and acquaintances — his two wives, both of whom he outlived; his longtime friend and abolitionist senator Charles Sumner; such eminent literati as Charles Dickens and Nathaniel Hawthorne. In a graceful stroke of theatrical economy, Noel has written all of these dozens of characters for two ensemble actors; director Ron Botting’s impeccable casting gives us an excellent pair: Mark Honan (veteran of PSC, the Theater Project, and the Stage at Spring Point) and Sally Wood (who has done much fine work up in Monmouth). Responsible for much of the pace and movement of the show, they have a fine sense of balance, and shift the tone nimbly between humor and gravity in support of Noel in the title role.

On Anita Stewart’s lean, elegant set of Victorian furniture before a clear white hearth and wall (which doubles as a screen for period projections — some poignant, some a bit superfluous) all three do a marvelous job delivering the written language of the day, rendering it passionate, colorful, and even playful. And Noel has chosen some fine passages to move us through the poet’s life: In his youthful, wild-oat-sowing days in Europe, he notes with awe that “you would not believe the carryings on there are here” (including men with monkeys!). Of his rise to literary fame we hear early fan mail from Hawthorne, as well as of a less renowned correspondent who requests an acrostic love poem for his sweetheart. We hear of Longfellow’s musings on the American character (“a composite one”), the atrocities of slavery, and the secession of the Southern states. We’re privy to his procrastination on Evangeline, his charming observations about his children, and, overall, a childlike warmth and fascination for so much in his life.

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