Reviewed by Rosalind Lacy
Jason Stiles and Sunshine Cappelitti (photo: C. Stanley Photography)
As the Washington Stage Guild director Bill Largess observes in The Countess program, the scandal of the 19th Century would make news in our supermarket tabloids today.In 1853, John Ruskin, a great writer who clarified and defined the Victorian Age, publicly defended the avant-garde, pre-Raphaelite artists for freeing the art world from the Royal Academy’s rigid rules. Appearances were deceiving. At home as a husband, he was prim and arid, a neurotic mess. But he blamed his "mentally unbalanced" wife, Euphemia, a.k.a. Effie, for the strife. "You’re not what I think a woman should be." He wanted a marble Venus or a painting of a Renaissance saint, an ideal. No twenty-first century woman would put up with such a pompous, suffocating prig. Neither did Effie. She ran off with Ruskin’s protégé, the pre-Raphaelite painter, John Millais. Queen Victoria banned Effie, who was not exactly a Princess Di, from existence over their divorce.
As a play, The Countess is a dazzling, wonderfully ironic little gem. The cast in this well-paced production is superb. Debuting at the Washington Stage Guild, Sunshine Cappelletti (Effie), nicknamed "the countess", positively glows with incandescent rebellion. Effie is really a gorgeous and rebellious Ophelia. Physically, it’s as if Cappelletti stepped out of a John Millais painting of that title, hanging on the Ruskin parlor wall. [Read more...]
