I went to see Alan Stanford’s adaptation of Jane Eyre at the Guthrie Theater on Sunday night.

I’m trying to remember the last time I was so deeply moved by a live performance, and I’m not able to come up with anything. Jane Eyre was just stunning.

Having loved Jane Eyre for thirty years (and having written a chapter of my doctoral dissertation on the novel), I was initially a little skeptical about the idea of a three-hour dramatic adaptation. Things that work well on paper don’t always translate well to the stage. And Jane Eyre presents a number of dramatic challenges.

First of all, the novel is bleak. The themes are abuse, religious coercion, and a brutal, almost unrelenting loneliness. Besides that, Jane Eyre owes much of its force to Jane’s reflective and imaginative narration–a narrative style that can’t easily be embedded into stage dialogue. And finally, the novel’s love story mostly takes place in the heroine’s head, conveyed through interior monologue, and Rochester’s bullying behavior and gruff language aren’t (on the surface) very love-worthy.

But the Guthrie’s production handled all those obstacles wonderfully. Jane (sensitively portrayed by Stacia Rice) and Rochester (Sean Haberle) have great, funny chemistry. I never expected that Jane Eyre could be funny!

Even better: through the technique of creating an older Jane who comments on the action (like a Greek chorus) and interacts with the younger Jane, Bronte’s beautiful narrative style was able to be preserved. This strategy enabled the performers to showcase some of my favorite passages from the novel–like the sad scene where Jane tells herself to paint a faithful self-portrait and one of her beautiful rival and to place them side-by-side whenever she’s tempted to imagine herself worthy of Rochester.

Yes, the production was bleak. Dark sets, gray colors, restrictive costumes, and lots of repressed emotion. But these elements only made the happy ending all the more cathartic when it finally came. Jane’s crushing loneliness has ended, and she is at last in the arms of a man who knows what it is to suffer and who loves only her.

“Reader,” says the older Jane (just as half of the audience begins to weep), “I married him.”