The Dating Game

Review of Pride and Prejudice, Playhouse on Park

The production of Pride and Prejudice currently running at Playhouse on Park in West Hartford does Kate Hamill proud. Adapting one of Jane Austen’s best-known novels, Hamill casts a contemporary screwball eye on the Bennet family and their efforts to wed—or not—and takes these familiar characters through their paces with a renewed sense of how wryly comical “the game” of match-making is, at all times, and how fraught with peril it can be when one’s entire livelihood depends upon it, as it does here.

Directed by Jason O’Connell, who not only played the surly Mr. Darcy to Hamill’s Lizzy Bennet in the first two productions of the play, but is married to the author, this version gets the zaniness right. A defect of the recent Long Wharf production of the same play was less zest in rendering Hamill’s brand of comedy, which sees a virtue in silliness. Here, with bathroom jokes and disco dance moves added to the gender-bending that the script calls for, the show has an irreverent and irrepressible spirit. And that’s all to the good—because this Pride and Prejudice is much more fun than most rom-coms of recent memory.

Jane (Nadezhda Amé), Lydia (Kelly Letourneau), Mrs. Bennet (Maia Guest), Charlotte Lucas (Sophie Sorensen), Lizzy (Kimberly Chatterjee) in the Playhouse on Park production of Pride and Prejudice by Kate Hamill (photo by Meredith Longo)

Once upon a time there were four young ladies named Bennet: Jane (Nadezhda Amé), the eldest and acknowledged looker; Lizzy (Kimberly Chatterjee), the bookish and ironic one; Mary (Jane Bradley), the unappealing one (though why, particularly, is never made clear, which in itself is a joke that arrives in a variety of ways); and Lydia (Kelly Letourneau), the lusty youngest. Mrs. Bennet (Maia Guest), their mother, is a nervous wreck in trying to marry them off despite the taciturn indifference of her husband (Sophie Sorensen) and the fluctuating feelings of the young ladies themselves.

The problem, of course, is the lack of beaux. And that’s where the story finds its rom-com dimensions, for we will find that everyone—except Mary—may find a someone. And that includes Lizzy’s bestie, Charlotte Lucas (Sophie Sorensen) whom Mrs. B is afraid will scarf up one of the few eligible bachelors about, before her daughters can. Bachelor #1 is Mr. Bingley (Jane Bradley) who is something of a frisky pup of a fellow, and whom his snooty sister (Matthew Krob) will keep out of the Bennet clutches no matter what. Bachelor #2 is Mr. Darcy (Nicholas Ortiz), whom Lizzy deems insufferable because of the way he dissed them at a ball. Bachelor #3 is the seemingly dashing Mr. Wickham (Matthew Krob) who has had his own run-in with the ever-unpleasant Darcy. Bachelor #4 is the hilariously unctuous Mr. Collins (Krob, yet again) who has his eye on whichever Bennet girl might not turn him down. He, a Bennet cousin, is to inherit the Bennet property when Mr. Bennet dies, due to patriarchal rules of descent. The girls, without a staunch male at their respective sides, are doomed to penury, or at least to a level of life quite below their present rank.

Jane (Nadezhda Amé), Lizzy (Kimberly Chatterjee), Charlotte Lucas (Sophie Sorensen) in the Playhouse on Park production of Pride and Prejudice by Kate Hamill (photo by Meredith Longo)

Thus it’s all a very middle-class ladies affair in which one either marries up or level or down, but no one can simply stay where they are. The bachelors—except for Wickham who is, alas, merely a lieutenant—all have anything from comfortable to extravagant fortunes. And so there are some upper-class ladies in the game as well. Miss Bingley might have an eye out for Darcy, as does Miss DeBourgh (Nadezhda Amé), daughter of Mr. Collins’ grand patron Lady Catherine DeBurgh (Kelly Letourneau) and a rather fearsome—and quite comical—wraithlike figure.

What makes Austen’s novel run is the way in which pairing off is fraught with misgivings, misunderstanding, and, sometimes, misinformation. The comedy here is to take these familiar types and tweak them toward the contemporary. So that when, for instance, Mary takes to the piano forte and sings, it will be a very emo affair. Or when the dancers hit the floor they will do The Hustle (and to see Mr. Bennet giving it his rendition is no small comic matter). There are broadly played types—such as Krob’s phrase-making Mr. Collins—and more subtle types, such as the superciliousness both female and male Krob brings to Miss Bingley and Mr. Wickham respectively. Guest’s Mrs. Bennet is fully in the spirit of both Austen’s and Hamill’s sense of a relentless woman who uses all her wits to live within the strictures set upon her—she’s seemingly a born manipulator and gossip, and is apt to love best whichever daughter marries best.

Lydia (Kelly Letourneau), Mrs. Bennet (Maia Guest), Mr. Bennet (Sophie Sorensen), Mary (Jane Bradley), Jane (Nadezhda Amé) in the Playhouse on Park production of Pride and Prejudice by Kate Hamill (photo by Meredith Longo)

Sorensen brings a twinkling irony to Mr. Bennet, and Ortiz makes Darcy a bit of a conundrum even to himself. His attempt at romance falls like a stone, and his grand comeuppance—and deliverance—arrives with a wonderful bodily tremor that fully captures a man overcome by conflicting emotions. For we must keep sight of—to render Austen faithfully—the class-bound strictures that might, at any turn, prevent a happily ever after. That’s most clear in what becomes of poor Lydia, who is kept just dim enough to not be fully cognizant of how, in “winning,” she has lost.

In the most rewarding—and demanding—double role, Bradley makes Mary not only a figure of fun but also of a kind of darkly pointed distaste, and, as Bingley, gives a very different comical turn. Dressed sometimes as both characters—or, rather, half and half—Bradley is the potentially loose cannon in every scene, and a late transition between the two roles earns a delighted burst of applause.

Miss Bingley (Matthew Krob), Mr. Bingley (Jane Bradley) in the Playhouse on Park production of Pride and Prejudice by Kate Hamill (photo by Meredith Longo)

Kimberley Chatterjee’s Lizzy, who is our heroine however much she might find that beneath her, sticks to her guns as we might well hope she will, and when she wavers does so with a forthright appraisal of herself that is a fine dramatic turn. For the only truly worthless people—in both Austen and Hamill—are those who can’t improve.

The show is well-served by an open playing space that helps to keep things lively, and by a wall of period-appropriate doors in Randall Parsons’ capable set. We have just enough suggestion of the level of comfort enjoyed at the different estates where the action takes place, and the costumes by Raven Ong have the requisite plainness—for the Bennets—with the necessary ostentation where required for the others, as for instance the ever-superlatively-announced Lady Catherine DeBourgh.

This Pride and Prejudice has laughs aplenty and an earned sense of all’s well that ends well.

Pride and Prejudice
By Kate Hamill
Adapted from the novel by Jane Austen
Directed by Jason O’Connell

Scenic Designer: Randall Parsons; Costume Designer: Raven Ong; Sound Designer: Kirk Ruby; Lighting Designer: Johann Fitzpatrick; Choreographer: Joey Beltre; Dialect Coach: Jen Scapetis-Tycer; Stage Manager: Mollie Cook; Props Master/Set Dresser: Eileen OConnor

Cast: Nadezhda Amé, Jane Bradley, Kimberly Chatterjee, Maia Guest, Matthew Krob, Kelly Letourneau, Nicholas Ortiz, Sophie Sorensen

Playhouse on Park
February 19-March 8, 2020

Matchmaking Games

Review of Pride and Prejudice, Long Wharf Theatre

Jane Austen’s much admired novel Pride and Prejudice got the Kate Hamill treatment in 2017. Hamill, trained as an actor, starred in new plays she adapted from old properties, allowing her, in the latter years of this decade, to assay three great heroines of British fiction: Marianne Dashwood (Sense & Sensibility), Becky Sharp (Vanity Fair), and Lizzy Bennet (Pride & Prejudice), as reconceived by her comic skills. The latter play, sans Hamill and directed by Jess McLeod, occupies the slot reserved for “a modern adaptation of a classic play” in the Long Wharf Theatre’s current season. In fact it’s a revival of a contemporary play adapted from a classic novel with some of the verve for skewering the 19th century that one finds, for instance, in the first act of Caryl Churchill’s Cloud 9. (From 1979, Cloud 9 was performed at Yale School of Drama in 2013 and Hartford Stage in 2017.)

Jane Bennet (Octavia Chavez-Richmond), Lizzy Bennet (Aneisa J. Hicks), Charlotte Lucas (Rami Margron) in Pride and Prejudice at Long Wharf Theatre, 2019

I was put in mind of the latter play by P&P’s use of comical casting, or casting against the grain. In Cloud 9, whoever plays the happy Victorian hunter and man of the house in Act One has to play a modern female child in Act Two. There, the doubling is mostly a jab at music hall comedy (men in female clothing having been trusted to raise guffaws for centuries). Here, when a very tall male (Luis Mareno) plays silly aristocrat Bingley as well as Mary, the most ill-favored of the Bennet clan (the third of four girls rather than Austen’s five), the hoary comic trope still lands, determined to inspire cheap laughs.

However, thanks to what Mareno does with the role, the doubling has perhaps something more behind it. Mareno makes Mary a loose cannon of odd asides, sad/funny bids for attention, and the kind of note-taking that family members readily store against others (“you locked me in a closet,” as a multivalent line, cuts more each time Mary says it). Likewise, the fact that whoever plays Mr. Bennet also plays Charlotte, the friend of Lizzy who takes one for the team by marrying unctuous Mr. Collins (Brian Lee Huynh, more later), lends a kind of paternalism to Charlotte and BFF status to Mr. Bennet. Here both roles are played by Rami Margron with notable command of both feminine and masculine registers.

Mary Bennet (Luis Moreno) in Pride and Prejudice at Long Wharf Theatre

The cross-casting is intrinsic to Hamill’s conception, letting the play step nimbly amongst the ruins of gender roles that performativity would have us progress beyond. What might push the theatrical effect a step further? All the cross-gender roles are ancillary. It’s still a story of boy, cast as such, meets girl, cast as such. While there’s no way anyone would mistake this for a faithful rendering of Austen, we don’t get anything really surprising either. At the Long Wharf, Pride and Prejudice is a comedy of manners where the posh British tones of classic Austen have been dismissed as mannered while the nonwhite cast is left to veer among mannerisms. How funny you find that I leave to you.

In my view, who fares best in this production—which is never quite as rollicking as it seems to hope it is (pacing!)—is Brian Lee Huynh. The actor has an always comical grasp of how to exploit the manner of each of his three parts. As the supercilious Miss Bingley—she detests those Bennet girls—Huynh might be a catty male in drag or a catty female past bloom (and dares you to tell the difference); as the caddish but sympathetic Mr. Wickham, he’s part comic villain, part dashing lead, and part ironic commentary on both, and as Mr. Collins, a poseur poised to marry at his patroness’s dictate, he’s divertingly daffy. In each role, both Austen and Hamill are well served. Well played.

Lydia (Dawn Elizabeth Clements), Mr. Wickham (Brian Lee Huynh) in Pride and Prejudice at Long Wharf Theatre

Elsewhere, the effects are more grab-bag, but Act Two lands better than Act One. The latter has not one but two grand balls where the lack of extras makes space itself seem to hang, while at home the fond rapport between Mr. Bennet and Lizzy (a linchpin of the novel) barely registers. Margron’s Mr. B. really comes into his own in Act Two when suitors come thick and fast. Jane Bennet (Octavia Chavez-Richmond), who’s supposed to be “the catch,” seems to be the rather tepid lover Darcy takes her for, early on. Chavez-Richmond has more fun with Miss Anne De Burgh’s neurasthenic quaver and a fantasy of Jane as temptress, both in Act Two. As Mr. Darcy, Biko Eisen-Martin does haughtily awkward well and bursts into pained eloquence in Act Two with force enough to melt even the skepticism of Lizzy, we imagine.  As Lizzy, Aneisa J. Hicks, ever-arrayed in patterned culottes, seems willfully obtuse in Act One, but her passions and bashfulness come to the fore in Act Two (after Darcy does her a service and she gets to see the dude’s sumptuous domicile). And yet the pair’s happy-ever-after kiss is all but spoiled by the bad matches made by Charlotte and by Lydia.

As the youngest (fourteen), Lydia is played by Dawn Elizabeth Clements as a sitcom princess, all cutesy girlish sashay in Act One; in Act Two she reappears as the Mean Girl/Dame, Lady De Burgh, and, while Lydia’s ultimate comeuppance seems way harsh, Clements is at her best in making us register the heart-shaking incomprehension of the child-bride. As Mrs. Bennet, for whom railroading her daughters into the best possible marriages is the key to success, Maria Elena Ramirez is never as vacuous as the role is generally deemed (even by Austen, I daresay). Her gravitas comes from preemptive mourning over her girls’ missed chances, a sort of memento mori for the death-in-life that yawns when marriageability ends.

Lizzy Bennet (Aneisa J. Hicks), Jane Bennet (Octavia Chavez-Richmond), Mrs. Bennet (Maria Elena Remirez), Mary Bennet (Luis Moreno), Lydia Bennet (Dawn Elizabeth Clements), Mr. Bennet (Rami Margron) in Pride and Prejudice at Long Wharf Theatre

Costumes, by Izumi Inaba, are a riot of patterns and overlays on female characters that seem designed not to flatter their wearers (more of that against the grain aesthetic, I assume), though the male costumes generally do. The set by Gerardo Díaz Sánchez features a handsome staircase and ballroom/sitting-room—with a décor like a bordello on acid. Sound Designer/Original Music Composer Megumi Katayama’s boomy rhythms come through loud and clear but the dialogue at times less so amidst all the movement.

The Long Wharf’s Pride and Prejudice takes pride in overcoming any prejudices about who is able to play whom. Fine, but it could be much funnier.

Pride and Prejudice
By Kate Hamill
Adapted from the novel by Jane Austen
Directed by Jess McLeod

Set Design: Gerardo Díaz Sánchez; Costume Design: Izumi Inaba; Lighting Design: Jennifer Fok; Original Music & Sound Design: Megumi Katayama; Choreography: James Beaudry; Hair, Wig & Make Up Design: Samantha Abbott; Production Stage Manager: Kelsey Vivian; Assistant Stage Manager: Amy Patricia Stern; Casting by Calleri Casting

Cast: Octavia Chavez-Richmond, Dawn Elizabeth Clements, Biko Eisen-Martin, Aneisa J. Hicks, Brian Lee Huynh, Rami Margron, Luis Moreno, Maria Elena Remirez

 Long Wharf Theatre
November 27-December 22, 2019

BBC Blues

I have been watching a lot of BBC Television lately. This surge of anglophilia was occasioned by my wife's return from Walmart with two collections of "BBC Video Classics" tucked into a plastic shopping bag. The first, "The Charles Dickens Collection," contained dramatizations of Our Mutual Friend, Great Expectations, Hard Times, Bleak House, Mrtin Chuzzelwit, and Oliver Twist; the second, "The Jane Austen Collection," featured—naturally enough—adaptations of her six complete novels.

Working my way through the latter, while folding laundry or stuffing envelopes, proved both illuminating and disappointing. The first thing you need to know is that both collections comprise BBC's first round of Masterpiece Theatre-like forays into high literature. All of the productions appeared in the 1970s and 1980s and were shot, to their detriment, as video.

Now let me be clear: I'm an unapologetically avid admirer of Austen. But no amount of avidity can forgive the woodenness of these productions. The stilted deliveries, passive blocking and not infrequent lack of dramatic subtext are fittingly complemented by the flaccid camera work, wan indoor lighting, and general absence of sound engineering. (Everybody speaks with a faint hallway echo).

While hardly distraught, I was, well, dismayed. Did Austen translate that badly? BBC productions clearly have the luxury of length, the lack of which in Hollywood productions was a continual source of frustration for me. In Emma Thompson's rendering of Sense and Senibility (1995), there is no midnight visit by the faithless but regretful John Willoughby, seeking forgiveness for his caddish behavior; in Keira Knightly's Pride and Prejudice (2005), scenes in Rosings Park and Pemberley are painfully abridged, while several characters were altogether eliminated.

Perhaps the faults I perceived lay in the dramatizations (the British term then for adaptation). I had started with Pride and Prejudice, a personal favorite. This BBC version had the distinct honor of being adapted for video by British writer Fay Weldon. Yet despite the seeming coup in selection of dramaturg, the execution was pale at best. It certainly did not compare favorably to BBC's 6-part reworking in 1995 with Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth Bennet and Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy. And yet somehow, I did receive some modicum of pleasure, so I turned to my next favorite novel, which I had recently read: Persuasion.

Ack! It was unwatchable. The blind were surely leading the blind when someone cast 38-year-old Ann Firbank as the 27-year-old Anne Elliot. Even worse, that someone then set her against the much younger looking Valerie Gearon (who was 34 but looked 25!), who played Anne's elder sister, Elizabeth Elliot. The overall effect was creepy, with the younger sister, the romantic object of the novel, looking like the older sister's mother!

The real test ultimately proved to be Sense and Sensibility because here I could compare BBC and Hollywood productions and directly. (I owned the 1995 movie version.) Now I could assess more intelligently what worked and what did not. The differences were palpable. Despite the inevitable contractions that movies impose on their novelistic sources, both adaptations shared a number of identical lines, demonstrating by contrast what real talent can deliver. Emma Thompson, Alan Rickman, Hugh Grant, and Kate Winslet earn their reputations for subtlety and expressiveness when compared to the weirdly vapid and at times uninspired verbiage of the BBC production, which no doubt explains Masterpiece Theatre's reputation among some Americans in the '70s and '80s as a waste of cathode rays.

And yet…and yet, I can't seem to give up my commitment to Austen, even when done badly. To be blunt, as dramatizations of literary classics go, these BBC "video classics" suck—but not so much as not to be worth the watching. So is this what makes a "classic" a classic? Somehow the stories still compel even as the productions repel. There is a mystery here that I can't explain.

But forgive me. I see I have a load of laundry on the bed and Mansfield Park is in the DVD drive, so I best get back to work…