Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women isn’t an obvious choice as a holiday play: It’s not traditionally conceived that way and, even if you’ve read the book as many times as I have, you might well have forgotten, as I had, that the story opens with a Christmas holiday celebration. 

As it happens, dramaturg Kamilah Bush’s show notes for Portland Center Stage, where the play continues through December 21, include some helpful analysis of how the celebration of Christmas in American culture changed during the very Civil War time period in which Little Women is set. 

But this adaptation by Lauren Gunderson, directed by Joanie Schultz, mostly isn’t aiming so directly at holiday traditions.  It is aiming for what theatergoers are hungry for during the holiday season in particular: something positive, comforting, familiar, and hopeful. This production is all of those things.

The beloved novel has inspired many adaptations, and it is a natural subject for Gunderson, who has demonstrated a facility for adapting beloved historical novels centering female characters, including the works of Jane Austen. Little Women fits right inside that oeuvre: The novel blazed a trail for stories by and about girls; stories that took seriously their struggles, aspirations, hardships, and loves. To the author’s surprise, it was an immediate success, and it hasn’t waned since its first volume was published in 1868. 

Perhaps it helped that Alcott resisted the idea of writing a book for and about girls. Gunderson’s adaptation centers Alcott the author, and depicts the negative reaction she reportedly had when her editor suggested she write a such a book — that she didn’t know any girls beyond her sisters, and preferred boys. 

Indeed, some scholars suggest that Alcott may have experienced what we would now term gender dysphoria; she expressed that she had a “man’s soul” and, as author Peyton Miller wrote recently, the clues we have suggest that “she may not have known the word ‘transgender,’ but she certainly knew the feeling it describes.” 

Alcott’s books about girls reflect that insider-outsider perspective, and make room for more girls, and more of what it means to be a girl. That may well be the secret to their enduring popularity.

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Gunderson astutely puts Alcott into this play about her semi-autobiographical work. It begins with her, and makes the connection between herself and her actual sisters and the beloved characters in Little Women. Though most of the story onstage follows the beats of the novel, occasionally the actors will switch to third-person description of the action and of the inner life of the character they portray, allowing Gunderson to slip in additional insights about motivations and emotions that make the novel so appealing. 

As with other productions of Gunderson’s play, this one has a multiracial cast: As Alcott made space for difference, the production makes even more space for a broader range of expressions of people to be seen as sisters. 

Beasley, a Black Cincinnati theater artist who will also play Jo in the January 2026 production of the play at Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park (co-produced with Portland Center Stage and also directed by Schultz), embodies Jo’s furious resistance to conform to any of the expectations foisted on an American girl in the 1860s. If that resistance at times feels a bit more like present-day resistance, that may well be the point.  This production aims to please audience members who will find that approach positive, comforting, familiar, and hopeful — and perhaps pull a few more audience members into that description. 

The other cast members are along for that ride: At least three are based in Oregon; Sammy Rat Rios (a familiar and welcome presence on Portland stages) matches Jo’s furious energy with Amy’s intense drive to grab more than life appears poised to promise her; Hannah Fawcett’s Meg balances attraction to convention and an inclination to chafe against its limits; and Rocco Weyer is an especially good Laurie, Jo’s best friend and would-be paramour. He and Beasley make for delightful partners in play and resistance; it’s a pleasure to watch them make each other better, as good friends do. 

The rest of the cast balances the energy nicely. Brianna Woods, who hails from Dallas, Texas, imbues her Beth with appropriate fierceness that deepens our sense of her connection with the other characters. Connan Morrissey is all reassurance as Marmee, but her performance is grounded in experience and more honesty than mother figures often are allowed to play. And Kieran Cronin offers a variety of male characters who support the women in a variety of ways; Alcott, and Gunderson, have shifted the energy of roles for men in important ways.

The design elements buoy this retelling. Chelsea Warren, a long-time collaborator with Schultz who is working at PCS for the first time, gives us a scenic design that is both magical and spartan. 

This isn’t a purely realistic retelling, as the cast members move between first and third person and themselves move set pieces during the play’s action. But the set, along with sound design by T. Carlis Roberts and lighting design by Sarah Hughey, work to convey a sense of magic emerging from practical inventiveness. The costumes by Lucy Wells are true to the period, but with more modern flourishes that support a sense that the production wants to keep the story moving toward current relevance.

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The movement direction by Vanessa Severo (whose movement design I admired in Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s recent production of Shane) deserves special mention. As director Schultz is quick to acknowledge, the inventive but spartan scenic design works in large part because of the movement architecture that Severo has built to enhance scene transitions and shifts in perspective. Severo knows how to enlist embodied movement to spark imagination and to help us see and feel what otherwise is only suggested. 

The result satisfies in all the intended ways, including for kids who have come to love Alcott’s work, and also for those who would appreciate the introduction. It’s well-constructed and offers holiday audiences what draws them to the theater.

Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women

• Where: Main Stage, Portland Center Stage at The Armory, 128 N.W. 11th Ave., Portland
• When: 7:30 p.m Wednesday-Sundays; matinees 2 p.m. Saturdays-Sundays and some Thursdays, through Dec. 21
• Tickets: Here