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The theme of female oppression comes out early in the play.

Saturday May 05, 2001.     By Kari Lyderson

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Blue Rider Theatre

A large wooden mill-wheel turns slowly in the background, casting spinning shadows eerily against the wall. Matrons in corsets and gentlemen in tailcoats move in slow motion to the sound of gurgling water, struggling through floodwaters in an oppressive small town in Yorkshire, England in the 1860s. A woman named Maggie screams and writhes against the wall, while her younger self dashes hysterically around the stage alternating between fits of impish giggles and desolate sobbing. These scenes give a hint of the exaggerated emotion, surrealness, moodiness and underlying sense of desperation and loneliness in the Vitalist Theatre's presentation of The Mill on the Floss at the Blue Rider Theatre in Pilsen through Dec. 21.

The play, adapted from the George Eliot novel by British playwright Helen Edmundson, is directed by Elizabeth Carlyn Metz, an arts professor at the Chicago arts program run through the Associated Colleges of the Midwest. The hyper-physicality brought to the story by Edmundson, and emphasized even further by Metz, serves to show the frustration and passion lying just under the surface of straight-laced Victorian society. The script is a semi-autobiographical tale by Eliot, who was born Mary Ann Evans in 1819 and had to write under a man's name because of the gross inequality between the sexes at the time.

The theme of female oppression comes out early in the play: Maggie's father, who dotes on her, nevertheless laments that she is too bright and independent to ever amount to anything by the standards of the time. The local minister says it straight out: "Girls have a lot of superficial knowledge but they can't get into anything deeply. They're quick and shallow, shallow and quick."

Maggie, Eliot's alter-ego, is brash and wild as a young girl despite the shock and scorn of her older relatives. As a young woman she is sadly reined in to a more obedient and "moral" way of life, though her young self still returns constantly to urge her to loosen up. By the end of the play a mature but also sad Maggie emerges: she is more willing to follow her heart, but she is still too tied to convention to surrender herself to what might be the ultimate love of her life.

The staging and direction of The Mill on the Floss at the Blue Rider is dramatic, eerie and earthy, with a set that genuinely evokes the era and an often comic energy just barely taking the edge off the mental discomfort and repression that defines these lives. The contemplative, reedy original music, by composer Darin Wilson, is super-imposed with the spinning mill wheel to make even the scene changes a piece of art in themselves.

The almost-3-hour play also opens and closes with a chilling re-enactment of the witch trial where a woman was thrown in a river, and deemed innocent of witchcraft only if she drowned. This is the type of no-win situation Eliot found herself in as an intelligent and driven woman in the 1870s. As the dark play shows, she tried to resolve this conflict by disguising herself as a man and pulling those she loved close to her with one hand while pushing them away with the other.

The Mill on the Floss runs at the Blue Rider Theatre, 1822 S. Halsted, through Dec. 21 with shows at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday. Tickets are $14 with group and discount rates available. For tickets call 312-409-3970.