A Wild Truth

A crime of gentility in Gramercy Park! The Sturtevant sisters, the park setting, could pass as a faded daquerreotype. Gramercy Park is still a private enclave in mid-New York, unsharing of secrets within codes of the society of the Five Hundred families. Mansions have features reflecting past, and present owners. This enclosure aches with regrets, crying out for liberty to love wildly, to roam, to sing a self, or to commit a crime. Early on the residents judged the Player's Club in the quadrangle to be a bad mix. Esme and Cecilie live in a mansion opposite the Player's Club. Cecilie, the younger, weds a promising actor, Adam Addams, who was reared in the Club, the son of janitors. Convicted of her murder, he stands condemned, and awaits sentence set by a report from the probation department. Dan Biggs, an officer, is burned out. Reports are ad hoc hurried tintypes, which belie the purpose of tailored sentencing. A devalued life devalues his own! Biggs is drawn like a fan to the theatricality of the crime. Among artists, he becomes an artist in mind, restoring depth to his emotional life. His report is a performance by a puppet theatre, which reenacts the wild truth of the crime. In a Court of Law? Outrageous! The denouement turns on the meaning of a locket, and its pathos for Esme and Cecilie.