Enchanted April: Play based on 1922 novel will take Salt Lake audiences from rainy Britain to sunny Italy

For its March slot — especially a March that seems to be roaring about like a lion instead of being a docile lamb — Pioneer Theatre Company is producing Matthew Barber's stage version of Elizabeth Von Arnim's 1922 novel "Enchanted April."

The most recent British film version was a popular "chick flick" 15 years ago.

The first half of the PTC's production is a series of short scenes all set in England, where it's raining, and the action takes place in cramped interior spaces, according to guest director Bruce K. Sevy, a former Utahn who is associate artistic director and director of New Play Development at the Denver Center Theatre Company.

But the second act transports the audience to Italy, where it's sunny and warm.

The latter — the bright, warm landscape surrounding a rented Italian castle — should be the perfect antidote for the wintery onslaught and dreary haze of the past few weeks along the Wasatch Front.

The plot revolves around four British women — two married, one a carefree "modern," the fourth a widow — as they share expenses to rent a villa in Italy for a month.

Sevy was quick to admit that "it's a chick-flick kind of play, and I remember liking the movie at the time."

He first saw Barber's script when he and his current boss, Kent Thompson, were both at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival in Birmingham before "Enchanted April" debuted in 2000 at Hartford, Conn. "Ken almost had me do it in Alabama. It was the first draft, and there have been three other revisions since then. It's fun to see how it has mutated from Hartford to New York (where it was produced in 2003).

"This is a good adaptation of the novel. I went back and read the book, which kind of fills in the backstory. The basic germ of the story is still there (in Barber's stage version). A lot in the script is very funny, but it's also very human."

Sevy has found the script "fun to sort of play with. You have these two middle-class housewives, Lotty and Rose, then at the other ends of the spectrum there's a modern flapper, and Mrs. Graves, who is deep into the literary tradition of the time. It's fun to explore all that."

He added, "I'm pleased with the cast. Chuck (Charles Morey, PTC artistic director) and I went out in January to cast this in New York City and saw some great people and we got all of our first choices."