Jessica Chastain and Dan Stevens in The Heiress.

There are many older plays that rely heavily upon our identification with long-abandoned sexual and marital norms for their dramatic power, and it requires a bit of work on the part of the audience to enter into a world in which infidelity or bastardy are life-and-death issues. For related reasons, contemporary plays about marriage and romance face a very high hurdle: In our time, there is so little at stake in sexual relations that additional elements often must be introduced in order to hold our attention. Nina Raine’s very popular Tribes, to take one example, would be one quirk short of a staged Wes Anderson film but for the elements extraneous to the romance at its heart, in this case the deafness that alienates the protagonist from his eccentric family and from his beloved. It is a good play, but the romantic drama—a lonely young man fears introducing his new girlfriend to his overly critical family—could hardly carry it alone.

John Gabriel Borkman is a terrific play (and the Alan Rickman–led production of it at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2011 was memorable), but the unhappy marriage anchoring it is as antiquated as anything in Sophocles or Marlowe. In contrast, Henry James’s Washington Square does not feel nearly so antiquated as it should. More relevant to our purposes here, neither does The Heiress, the play adapted from the novel by Ruth and Augustus