*** Picnic at Hanging Rock

Consider it an in-town tryout

Foreground: Kate Louissant as Marion in Picnic at Hanging Rock. Photo: Matthew Murphy

Venue size matters. If ever a dramatic arc called for a spacious setting, that would be the fictitious travails of a bevy of late-Victorian-era schoolgirls gone missing in the Australian Outback. Even made-up stories – this one is based on Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel, which inspired Peter Weir’s haunting 1975 film – require sufficient square footage to take convincing shape. Given the cramped dimensions of the Greenwich House Theater (est. 1917), it’s perhaps best to approach this premiere as a workshop production writ large.

The adaptation, with book and lyrics by Hilary Bell and music by Greta Gertler Gold, represents a valiant effort, though it unfurls at arduous length and suffers unnecessarily from a chopped-up timeline and a few too many furbelows. The creators have succeeded in capturing the kind of intense emotionalism – one hesitates to say hysteria – that can fester in a cloistered all-female community: think Suor Angelica, The House of Bernarda Alba, Erica Schmidt’s 2018 adaptation of Macbeth . . .

But a fourteen-member cast, plus a five-member band, is a lot to cram onto Daniel Zimmerman’s bilevel sketch of a set, pressed into service by director Portia Krieger as both boarding school and mountain. “Actually, it’s a mamelon,” quibbles class brainiac Marion, played by delightful Kate Louissaint, who doubles as dance captain – not that there’s much room to cut loose beyond a few wilding leaps into the audience.

Twenty rather sound-alike songs (plus four reprises) are a handful too many, despite the occasional delicious lyric, e.g., “We’ve been here for weeks on end / locked in a chintz and rosewood tomb,” as sung by Irma, the resident little princess (Tatianna Córdoba, late of Real Women Have Curves). That complaint arises right at the outset. Two and a half-hours in, we can relate.

But congratulations all just for getting the show on the boards. Two outstanding actor/singers make this Picnic a must-see, despite its unwieldy bulk. Gillian Jackson Han plays Miranda, a free-spirited, nature-loving senior girl who befriends the outcast Sara (Sarah Walsh), a damaged, asocial charity case. Miranda tends to the misfit as she would an ailing plant.

Details: Picnic at Hanging Rock, to January 17