The Cider House Rules
Dr. Wilbur Larch, the cantankerous obstetrician-orphanage director at the heart of John Irving’s 1985 novel The Cider House Rules, would probably approve. But to describe either the novel or Peter Parnell’s sweeping 1996 two-part stage adaptation as being about abortion is to obscure the work’s larger moral framework. (The truncated 1999 film version, also written by Irving, does make abortion central, sacrificing a great deal of nuance and narrative.) Larch is the conduit for Irving’s abiding conundrum: how can people be of use in the world? The abortion controversy–because it calls forth such a maelstrom of emotion–is simply the most incendiary means of raising the dramatic stakes.
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It’s noteworthy that Irving wrote the novel during the Reagan years–and was avowedly influenced by Charles Dickens. Though set during an 80-year span from the late 19th century to the 1950s, this excoriation of deadly faux morality and neo-Victorianism clearly echoes the outrage at institutional hypocrisy appropriate both to Dickens’s age and to the 1980s. Of course America’s treatment of children is timeless–we’re notorious for loving the concept of “the child” (particularly as a marketing demographic) while despising lots of actual children: according to the U.S. Census Bureau, nearly 12 million of our youngest residents live in poverty.
The second part of the play focuses more on Homer’s life and the choices he and others make. (A fast-moving prologue recapitulates part one.) At Ocean View Apple Orchard, Homer finds love with the good-hearted Candy Kendall, who unfortunately is also the lover of his benefactor and friend, Wally Worthington. Homer and Candy conceive a child, whom they pretend to have adopted from Saint Cloud’s. When Wally returns from World War II a paraplegic, Candy decides that she can’t choose between them: she loves them both. Wally needs her, so she marries him, but she maintains a connection with Homer.
