Thirty-five years ago, Robert Redford brought an all-star cast to Lake Forest to film the Academy Award-winning “Ordinary People.” Scott Phelps, artistic director of Lake Forest-based Citadel Theatre, decided that was the right story to launch Citadel’s first season as an Equity company.
Nancy Gilsenan’s dramatization of Judith Guest’s novel about an upper middle class Lake Forest family dealing with the death of one son and the attempted suicide of another, opens Sept. 18.
Phelps noted that the play is also relevant to Lake Forest because of three suicides by Lake Forest High School students in 2012.
He added that “Ordinary People” is “a tough play. But I think it’s a springboard to talk. We’re trying to get some high schools in. I’ve got psychologists and psychiatrists on board to do talkbacks with kids.”
Matt Ronzani plays Conrad, the young man who attempts suicide. Besides growing up in Lake Forest, the actor has another connection to the story. “My mom’s childhood home was used in the film in the party scene,” he noted.
The actor described Conrad as “a universal character. I think of him as up there with Holden Caulfield and these teenagers who are iconic in their angst and their struggles and yet have a certain honesty to them. They feel alien because they aren’t able to fake it as well as everyone else. He felt his most authentic self in the hospital.”
That’s where Conrad spends a lengthy stay following his suicide attempt. His mother never visits him.
“He can’t connect with his mom,” Ronzani said. “He feels she’s so distant but they actually are very similar in that they want things to be perfect and be consistent, and they are very evasive about their own feelings.”
Julie Stevens of Deerfield plays Conrad’s mother Beth. “It is such an iconic role,” Stevens declared. “I remember seeing the film years ago and those performances are burned into my memory.”
Stevens admitted that she has taken on a tough part. “I played Hedda Gabler and Hedda is like a walk in the park compared to Beth,” she said.
“Beth is very organized, very controlled, very North Shore. She’s a perfectionist and she has created this perfect family,” Stevens explained. “Everybody falls right in place. That’s the way she thought it would always be. When tragedy happened, her world was shattered — first by the death of the golden son. And just as she was hanging on by a thread, keeping appearances together, Conrad slits his wrists in the bathroom.”
Beth is determined to get life back to the way things were. “Which is, of course, impossible,” Stevens said.
Wealthy or not, when tragedy strikes the Jarretts are like other ordinary people.
Citadel Theatre Company presents, ‘Ordinary People’
Sept. 18-Oct. 18
300 S. Waukegan Road, Lake Forest
$35-$37.50
847-735-8554; www.citadeltheatre.org
