How Zadie Smith Took On the Wife of Bath

Zadie Smith’s take on the Wife of Bath opens at a pub in the London borough of Brent. People have gathered to tell stories drawn from their lives, just as Geoffrey Chaucer’s late-fourteenth-century pilgrims do en route to Canterbury. Enter Alvita, the Wife of Willesden. She is Smith’s reimagining of Alison, the Wife of Bath, and as sharp, spirited, and unapologetic as ever. In Smith’s Wife of Willesden—which premiered at London’s Kiln Theatre in 2021, opens at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on March 2, and heads to New York’s Brooklyn Academy of Music in April—a chorus of voices at the pub chime in as Alvita dishes on men and women, power and deception, sex and desire