Poor, pretty little Else. Seventeen and trembling on the brink of womanhood, she has already suffered the humiliation of being packed off as the poor relation with her rich cousins on holiday. Now comes the news that her shifty lawyer father has only 48 hours to raise a lot of money or face financial ruin and imprisonment. Her mother and father wonder whether she could offer herself to a former client, a lecherous old man who is staying in the same hotel. What is a young girl to do?
Arthur Schnitzler's ambiguous novella gets less interesting by the minute in this dull stage adaptation. Set almost entirely in Else's confused mind, the show fails to give any external reality to the internal and leaves actress Amy de Lucia with nothing to do except talk to herself. She conveys the fluttering heart of a young girl facing her first grown-up problem, but her lack of vocal range and grating American accent make you less sympathetic to her plight than is surely intended. The only tragedy here is that Schnitzler is so ill-served.
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