BRATTLEBORO-While Louisa May Alcott wrote a host of novels, poems, and short stories spanning sensationalist thrillers, feminist texts, and journalistic reportage, she may be best known for Little Women, a coming-of-age novel set in a Concord, Massachusetts-like New England town during the U.S. Civil War.
New England Youth Theatre (NEYT) presents a scripted version of this enduring story of family love and perseverance as its 2025 holiday show.
Adapted by Marisha Chamberlain and directed by NEYT’s artistic director, Ben Stockman, Little Women presents the four March sisters — Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy — and their mother, Marmee, through the often-tough times faced when the man of the house, Robert March, leaves home to serve as a Union chaplain in the Civil War.
After they lost the family fortune, “their deep affection for one another, innate hopefulness, and inner spark of creativity are all they have to carry them through,” states a NEYT press release.
Stockman points out that, although NEYT’s is “the same beloved story,” this version of the play represents the first of Alcott’s two books. Chamberlain ends her adaptation when the autobiographical Jo March, restless and a bit rebellious, rejects the marriage proposal of Laurie Laurence, leaving her uncertain of her future — but with options.
“Jo really has open possibilities at the end of this play,” he says.
Stockman had been eager to stage Little Women, a show that’s been mounted a few times already by NEYT, “from the moment I was hired” last year, he says. He chose it in part because “I wanted to put on a show grounded in the reality of doing and being on stage. That was exciting to me.”
Thus, for many of the show’s 15-player Senior Company cast, the show requires learning some new skills: knitting, embroidery, drawing, writing with a quill and ink, and playing piano.
‘The story is one everyone can find something in’
[Editor’s note: The following paragraphs contain what contemporary audiences would call “spoilers.” For the many readers who are familiar with the plot of the 19th-century literary classic, you’ll likely appreciate the perspectives of the young cast on their characters.]
The March sisters are double cast in the NEYT production. Rei Carpenter-Ranquist, a senior at Brattleboro Union High School (BUHS), plays a Beth. At a recent rehearsal, she spoke of the show: “This is a story from so long ago, and it’s still so present. It’s just a bunch of sisters and their lives together and how they bicker like all siblings, and when boy trouble comes into play, they defend each other like nothing else has mattered at all.”
Rei is drawn to this, she adds, because “my mom is one of four girls. I keep looking at this script and then at my mom and my aunts, and I’m like, ‘It’s the same thing.’ It’s just sisters going through life, growing up, being themselves, and finding how it is in the world.”
What’s the biggest challenge she’s faced in her role? “Learning to play piano. Immediately, that’s my answer,” says Rei, candid but clearly undaunted.
“I don’t have a lick of piano experience I’ve been in musical theater for a couple years,” she adds. “I’ve taken choir since I was little. I can read sheet music. I know music theory, but I’ve never taken a piano lesson — and I’m playing a piano prodigy.”
Rei adds “one really big thing about the character of Beth” that is important to her: “A lot of people, when they hear of Beth, think, ‘Oh, she’s the one that dies,’ as if that’s her whole thing.”
But she’s more than that, Rei insists.
“She’s growing up and becoming a person,” she says. “She had plans. She had ambitions in life. Even though she was agoraphobic — she was terrified of people — she still had dreams and ambitions. She had a future she wanted. And then horrible tragedy happened.”
It’s not, says Rei, “that she was destined for death. It’s that death got in the way of her destiny and what she wanted to do in life.”
Veronica Cottrell introduces herself as one of the two Megs. A homeschooled junior who has four sisters, Veronica’s in her third production with NEYT.
“Little Women is a beautiful story: It’s so important to come back to these tales of family and how we support each other during harder times, and then celebrate together during happier ones. I think the story is one everyone can find something in.”
Especially of the four sisters, she adds, “I think they show us how we can each really be our own person.”
Veronica defends Meg: “Meg wants only to get married? No, and I think it often gets misconstrued like that. That that’s the end of her story, and that it’s a bad thing. I think people forget that it’s Meg’s choice, and that’s what’s beautiful.”
And, she says, “Jo can write, but she won’t get married, and that’s her choice. Meg can choose to marry. Being successful in life doesn’t have to look one way.”
“Meg’s story is beautiful because she starts the journey as a girl who doesn’t know what she wants: She’s into this idea of being rich and having fancy things, but then she’s discovering as she’s going through these troubles that the things that really matter aren’t the material ones, but the emotional [things] and the people next to you, the people who are kind to you.
“So that’s what she values and that shouldn’t be considered any less” than the loftier aspirations of her sister, Jo,” Veronica says.
She paraphrases a favorite line: “Just because my dreams are different than yours doesn’t mean they’re any less important.”
“That really represents Meg,” Veronica says.
Anika Wiltermuth, a BUHS sophomore, plays Laurie’s tutor, John Brooke, in all performances. They observe: “I really like how each cast chooses to do things differently and just how differently they act.”
When talking of the show’s message, Anika adds that they expect audiences will be moved to “reflect on the March family and how it relates to your own family: The script is much more than the writing and the dreams part; it’s more about the family and the girls’ relationships with each other.”
Eva Lord, one of the Jos, started at NEYT in seventh grade. She’s now a junior at BUHS.
“I love the story of Little Women. The first time I saw the script I was kind of skeptical because it wasn’t exactly what I’d been expecting,” she says.
Some of the transitions are really quick, she adds, but the more she’s gone through the process, the more she’s known the cast can make it work.
When asked about creating her role, Eva says, “I’m not a naturally angry person. And I think that Jo has a lot of anger about different things, so portraying that and doing it authentically, I think, is one of the more challenging things that I’m facing.”
Bibi Johnson, a BUHS senior, plays the other Jo. Before anything else, Bibi shares: “I’m the worst knitter in the world.”
With authentic presentation being an important part of the directorial concept, having to do her part and knit on stage has been a challenge.
“I already know how to use [pen and ink] from artistic endeavors,” she says, “and I know how to write. But I did not know how to knit.”
She’s working on that in real time.
Bibi talks of Little Women as “being such a strong and relevant piece of literature,” noting how it presages 20th- and 21st-century issues of feminism.
Jo doesn’t want to be viewed as a typical woman of the time when “a sense of subservience” is expected, as is adherence to a “social norm where a woman’s expected to pretend to be less” than what she really is, Bibi says.
“She says in the play that she wants to be a boy. It’s not that she actually wants to be a boy; she wants the privileges that come with that,” she adds.
“She wants to be able to just stand alone at a party and not have anyone ask her to dance or ask her to get married and just be able to live her life and pursue her own endeavors without having to be tied down by some man.”
‘A real connection’
The experience at NEYT has been an enduring influence for many. Taz Hand, 13, who plays the suitor, Laurie, is son of NEYT mainstay, Rebecca Waxman. “My mom has worked here for a really long time,” he says, “so I’ve been helping out with shows since I was 4 or 5. My mom directed, and I helped her.”
A student at Dummerston Elementary, Taz says of the NEYT experience: “I feel like everyone here has a real connection. It feels like a completely different community than at school. And this is a great place to find [that] people like you and find people who understand you and [find] people who aren’t as, you know, judgy as you might find in a middle school.”
And it’s where a focus on life’s essentials and on being truly human come to play in Little Women, featuring costume design by Sandy Klein, set design by David Regan, lights and sound by Francesca Bourgault; and a tech, stage management, and costume crew of NEYT students.
The show runs Friday through Sunday, Dec. 12 to 14 and 19 to 21 at New England Youth Theatre, 100 Flat Street, Brattleboro. Advance tickets are available at neyt.org/little-women.
This Arts item by Annie Landenberger was written for The Commons.