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

Not So Trivial Pursuit

Review of The Importance of Being Earnest at Playhouse on Park

Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of the Being Earnest is a play that, in a sense, can’t go wrong, so long as its lines are audible. The sparkle isn’t only in Wilde’s famed witty apothegms, but in his handling of dialogue—the come-back that seems a non-sequitur, and vice versa, the aside spoken to someone, the bandying with another’s words to arrive at a different meaning. All this is so consummate, its style established an ideal of comic dialogue that most can only approximate. Faithfulness to Wilde’s brand of comedy, it seems to me, is a matter of not letting anything upstage the spoken lines, even as each character must maintain a fidelity to type without seeming too familiar.

The current production at Playhouse on Park in Hartford, directed by Jerry Winters, acquits itself handsomely on all those points. The playing space is thrust-style and intimate, and the blocking very capably makes use of all corners and angles so that every viewpoint, at some point, is faced with the central action. And since the action consists almost wholly of dialogue, its quite a nice balletic feat to have the talk move about, collecting and coalescing in different spots with the refreshing flow of natural movement. Christopher Hoyt’s scenic design plays well with symmetries that can be shifted about when necessary to suggest, visually, what the plot is getting at through the logic of courtship: we change partners, we change our “identities” to some extent, we alter where we alteration find. Same for the assurance of Joel Abbott’s able sound design: if the shifts sag, if the bon mots fall unheard, we’ll nod off or escape. Crispness is all, and this production has that.

Lady Bracknell (Katrina Ferguson)

Centering the action, in the supporting role that ruins all if not up to the mark, is Katrina Ferguson’s Lady Bracknell. She is the character who sets the tone, and holds everyone else to account. Ferguson is never petty or petulant, a Bracknell always more than equal to whatever comes down the pike. She is wry and resourceful and very much an asset to this production. As are the friends turned “Ernest,” James Parenti as Algernon and Michael Raver as Jack. They look impeccable and sound and move equally well in Erin Payne’s becoming costumes.

Raver, as the hero of the piece, is well-meaning and good-looking and full of a kind of “everyman” charm, able to be relentlessly affable and to rise to a peak of emotion when his fate is being decided. Parenti has an appearance of settled deviousness about him that adds greatly to the charm of the “bunburying” that is the dominant mode of the play. Wilde's assumption—and it is shared by Algernon—is that all of us play at something so as to conceal what we are really about, creating distractions or excuses so as to divert our onlookers. Jack, early caught in a version of the same ruse, feels guilty about it and has moral scruples. Algernon teaches Jack that his friend's “bunburying”—e.g., Jack’s fictitious brother—can be turned to his own profit.

The “earnestness” of all this comes down to Jack, who truly wants to marry Gwendolen (played with warm graciousness by Jane Bradley), and truly wants to stay in good graces with her mother, Lady Bracknell, as well as doing right by his ward, Cecily (played with pert insistence by Laura Hankin), while also having a certain free space to do as he pleases. Algernon, who is all for the free space and nothing but, initially, becomes “earnest” in his own right when he encounters the sweetly certain simplicity of Cecily. While not exactly rivals, Jack and Algy are brilliantly put into rivalry over a name: the claim to being called Ernest.

Gwendolen (Jane Bradley), Jack (Michael Raver), Cecily (Laura Hankin), Lady Bracknell (Katrina Ferguson), Algernon (James Parenti)

Wilde subtitles the play “A Trivial Comedy for Serious People,” alluding to the notion that nothing of importance—other than “being earnest”—is decided in the play. It is, delightfully, much ado about nothing, and yet the play might equally be subtitled “a serious comedy for trivial people” since much of what we get so serious about—our betrotheds and beloveds and espouseds, for instance—can seem trivial indeed to someone else. Love is as serious as life and death to those afflicted by it, and airy and insubstantial as the most trivial social nicety to those blithely untouched by it. Lady Bracknell is on hand to make certain that the trivial aspects of choosing a spouse—what we call the personal—do not interfere with the serious aspects, which is to say the social and, indeed, economic. All’s well that ends well-off, and that’s as it should be, for comedy. And for reversal, there’s the deft touch of a baby in a hand-bag to wink at the humble origins of many a hero.

In support there are many fine turns: the face-off between Gwendolen and Cecily, particularly, where good will, rivalry, and nastiness get coated with faultless manners; the wishing-to-please obtuseness of Dr. Chasuble (David M. Farrington) and the earnest accounting by Miss Prism (Donna Schilke); and don’t forget the laughs added by the slacking lackey Merriman (Harrison Greene).

The Importance of Being Earnest might too easily be considered style over substance, and Playhouse on Park’s production has style substantial enough to make the play shine—and that’s not trivial.

The Importance of Being Earnest
By Oscar Wilde
Directed by Jerry Winters

Scenic Designer: Christopher Hoyt; Lighting Designer: Christopher Jones; Costume Designer: Erin Payne; Prop Master: Pamela Lang; Sound Designer: Joel Abbott

Playhouse on Park
West Hartford, April 15-May 3, 2015