“Good night, you Princes of Maine — you Kings of New England!” exclaims Dr. Wilbur Larch more than once upon tucking the orphans into bed in Part 1 of The Cider House Rules. But this arguably sappy benediction is not the major leitmotiv of Peter Parnell’s sprawling adaptation of John Irving’s 1985 novel. That honor goes to a quotation from David Copperfield: “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.” There are no pages on view, but it’s clear by the end of the first half of this Dickensian saga of orphans, abortions, and apple picking that both Larch and surrogate son Homer Wells will be the heroes, however imperfect, of their lives.

It’s equally obvious that Parnell’s six-hour American answer to Nicholas Nickleby will restore to Irving’s tale much of the quirky, at times grotesque detail removed by the author in his Oscar-winning screenplay for the 1999 film. The movie tells the story of ultimate orphan Homer Wells. Both the book and the theater piece provide more back story for the flawed, altruistic Larch and how he came to be not just an obstetrician but an æther-snorting abortionist. Parnell’s work also retains the important character of angry, gargantuan orphan Melony (who’s Homer’s sexual awakener). And it deals head on with what Larch calls the “great ambiguity” of humankind’s attitude toward sex and babies.

There’s no doubt that The Cider House Rules, perhaps braver now when gun-toting fanatics are murdering physicians than when it was published, advocates choice — not only as the term is used in the argument over abortion but in the sense that all our lives are shaped by moral decisions. Moreover, the theater piece presents both sides of the abortion question without flinching from graphic narrative or visual imagery. As Larch tells Homer, you can determine your position, “but you are not permitted to look away!”

The Cider House Rules presents a considerable challenge that begins with its unwieldy two-part length. Like all Irving’s novels, the story of Homer Wells’s maturation, first at the orphanage at St. Cloud’s and then on his odyssey to an apple orchard on the coast of Maine, is crammed. At the end of Part 1, he has only just broken out for “other parts of the world”; more than half the novel remains. But Parnell and director Oskar Eustis are determined to convey the entire epic saga, complete with narrative voice. And the teeming Trinity production, the first of both parts on the East Coast, is also the first to cast real kids as the denizens of St. Cloud’s. Their presence, shrieking, kibitzing, and listening, makes the work’s very adult themes, which so affect the conditions of children, acutely immediate.

As you’d expect, the vigorous, roughhewn Trinity æsthetic proves suitable to Parnell’s adaptation. The work doesn’t need to be so long or cluttered with narrative (and Part 1 certainly doesn’t need two intermissions). But the Trinity ensemble’s sharp, robust style suits a piece with multiple characters and vignettes that must be imaginatively and economically trooped across the stage (complete with trucks, coach horses, and Wally Worthington’s white Cadillac, here represented by an examination table flanked by two very large, freestanding wheels). And the veteran Trinity actors are so accomplished that the transitions between their narrating and their enacting the characters’ lives are almost seamless.

Eugene Lee’s characteristically barnlike set, its slanted clapboards topped by large paned windows, manages to encompass the Ramses Paper Company turned orphanage and other environs, among them an abandoned lumbermen’s dormitory that Janice Duclos’s roaring Melony and Stephen Thorne’s impressionable Homer effectively wreck. And the finale’s opening of the back wall, behind which we’ve glimpsed an apple-laden world beckoning like Eden, is both thematically apt and a coup de théâtre. The folky, mood-setting music directed by Amanda Dehnert and played by a quartet in a windowed second-story cubby is also a plus.

At the heart of the story, though, are the characters Irving so compassionately draws, particularly the passive, developing Homer and his principled, rule-bending mentor. Thorne captures both the earlier-20th-century innocent and the adult before his time in Homer, who is at home “going inside the uterus” with instruments but narrates his first sexual encounter (which he endures in an at-ease position) with all the pained awkwardness it deserves. And Brian McEleney’s single-minded Larch, apologizing to ghosts when he isn’t exhaustively answering his calling, is so unflaggingly, irascibly humane he’s heartbreaking. The scene in which this celibate father and motherless son, frolicking in their lab coats as they cast huge shadows, react to a sea breeze sneaking toward St. Cloud’s seems prescient. “Both men,” Irving writes, “stood sniffing the wind. Each man thought: What is going to happen to me?” I read the book. I saw the movie. And still, this production is sufficiently compelling that I want to find out.

Issue Date: April 26-May 3, 2001