Review: Pontine explores Hawthorne's ancestral thriller

By MEGAN GRUMBLING | May 4, 2011

This makes all the melodrama quiet and curious, rather than overwrought: The spectacle of the story is subordinate to its atmosphere, which lends substance to its themes — the writer or storyteller as "mesmerist," and the implications of this for history, as it is told, continuously relived, and, on occasion, absolved.

Megan Grumbling can be reached at mgrumbling@hotmail.com.

THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES | an original adaptation of the book by Nathaniel Hawthorne | Created and performed by M. Marguerite Mathews and Greg Gathers | Produced by Pontine Theatre, at the West End Studio Theater in Portsmouth, NH | through May 8 | 603.436.6660 or info@pontine.org

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Topics: Theater , Salem, Theater, Nathaniel Hawthorne, More

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ARTICLES BY MEGAN GRUMBLING

THOUGHTFUL LAUGHS IN WITTENBERG | May 09, 2013
Much has been made of Prince Hamlet's exhausting philosophical indecision. To be or not? To kill or not? He has a hell of a time figuring it out, when he should be happily ensconced in college life back in Wittenberg.

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A SURREAL COMEDY FROM DRAMATIC REP | April 24, 2013
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WOOLF’S ORLANDO ON STAGE AT USM | April 25, 2013
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CAROLYN GAGE’S NEW SHORT PLAYS GIVE WOMEN VOICE | April 10, 2013
Women's experience of slavery, genocide, and cultural oppression, says playwright Carolyn Gage, is very different than men's: Sexual violence and women's ability to give birth makes them subject to a particularly penetrating form of colonization. And even the best-intentioned histories, she adds, often try to "disappear" that difference.