INNOCENCE ABROAD.(The Light in the Piazza)(Theater Review)

Once upon a time in the early sixties, the composer Mary Rodgers suggested to her gloomy father, the composer Richard Rodgers, that he adapt for Broadway Elizabeth Spencer's novella "The Light in the Piazza" (which occupied almost an entire issue of this magazine in 1960); the great man demurred. Four decades later, however, Mary Rodgers's son, the gifted composer and lyricist Adam Guettel, took up the challenge. Among the many delightful surprises in the resulting show, which opened last week at Chicago's Goodman Theatre, is its overture. Has any other American musical in the past twenty years had enough memorable melody to warrant such a thing? Guettel's tunes are richly textured and warmly atmospheric; like the Tuscan light of Spencer's story, they create "the sense that everything is clear and visible, that nothing is withheld."

Using violin, piano, and harp, Guettel's overture evokes the sun-dappled summer of Florence in the mid-fifties, where Margaret Johnson (Victoria Clark), a Southern lady of means and manners, has brought her jejune twenty-six-year-old daughter, Clara (Celia Keenan-Bolger), to see the sights. The production's central metaphor is a red-ribboned straw hat--in its design, somewhere between schoolgirl and Schiaparelli. At the beginning of Bartlett Sher's poised production, the hat drops from above into Margaret's hands before ending up on Clara's pert blond head. Soon it is blown back up and into the eager clutches of a twenty-year-old Italian charmer named Fabrizio (Wayne Wilcox). Clara's and Fabrizio's eyes meet, and--well, you know the rest. Or you think you do. The hat is an emblem of something lost and found, a symbol of hope that foreshadows the tempestuous trajectory of the story to come.

In a full skirt and white gloves, Clara seems a picture postcard of fifties normality, punch-pressed from a book marked "Ingenue." Her looks and her attitude--buoyant, dutiful, sweet, naive--conform to the bright banality of the time, giving her an air of coherence, and this is part of the play's drama and Clara's tragedy. Because, by degrees, and with little euphemistic clues from Margaret--"She isn't regular," she's "not quite as she seems"--Clara's strangeness emerges, like a shadow growing longer at the end of the day. There's the girlish, round-shouldered way she runs with her head down, the sudden emotional squalls, her charming forthrightness. "Look, a scar!" she says to Fabrizio, lifting her ponytail to show him something behind her ear. Her profound scars are, of course, invisible and not as easy to define. Her "dreary secret," as the story calls it, is revealed only late in the show; as a young girl, Clara was kicked in the head by a Shetland pony. She has a mental age of twelve.

But in this whirlwind romance--where neither lover comprehends the other's language or culture--otherness is the climate of connection. "I don't understand a word they're saying," Clara sings in "The Beauty Is." "I'm as different here as different can be / And the beauty is I still meet people like me." In fact, on an unconscious level, Fabrizio's acceptance of Clara's oddness is what draws her to him. He sees her in no context other than her own. This sentiment is conveyed brilliantly in "Love to Me," in which he reimagines the moment when he first caught sight of Clara. "Ohhhhh, you're not alone," he sings. "This is how I know / This is what I see / This is love to me." Fabrizio's fractured English doesn't prevent him from making himself known to Clara. "Now is I am happiness with you," he sings in "Passeggiata." In both deficiency and desire, Clara and Fabrizio are equals, and that is what makes intimacy between them possible. In a gorgeous duet, "Say It Somehow," Guettel has his handicapped lovers sing, "Say it somehow anyway you can / You know me . . . / I know the sound of touch me. / I think I heard the sound of wrap your arms ...