A terraced stage lit by warm pink, purple, and orange lighting, long canvases that frame a thrust-style stage, and long Regency era dresses will all bring the warm, romantic mood of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” to the Markel Auditorium from Oct. 4-8.
Despite these scene builders and even the presence of Jane Austen’s recognizable “Pride and Prejudice” characters, this is not a production of the beloved classic.
“Pride@Prejudice” is not the product of a typo. The at symbol is intentional, pointing to a production that celebrates the classic story while also highlighting the people who love it and the woman that wrote it.
“Our purpose is to ask what conversation with a text really means, and I think this play does that beautifully,” said Chris Matsos, director of the show and chairman of the theater department. “It converses with Jane Austen and with her work and just brings that question to our community. How do we converse with our favorite works, and what role does theater play in that conversation?”
The play itself unfolds like a crash course on “Pride and Prejudice” with many of the lines and scenes from the novel and the film adaptations. Throughout the play, this iconic dialogue is juxtaposed with internet dialogue, ranging from study questions to seventh-graders asking for homework help to enthusiastic Etsy shops advertising their merchandise.
“It doesn’t really pull away from the magic,” freshman Charles Reamsnyder said. “It’s a little dated. I remember we made comments about how sometimes it reads like an old Tumblr post from 2014, but honestly, I believe it opens up to a wider audience. People our age might find those little internet jokes to be a means of connecting, and it won’t lose some of our older members as long as they have some idea of what an old internet blog would look like.”
The play is written for a cast of six people to play 22 roles. Besides junior Kenda Showalter, who portrays Elizabeth Bennet throughout the entire show, each actor has anywhere from two to seven roles. Between junior Emily Griffith switching back and forth between Mrs. Bennet and Charlotte Lucas and junior Fiona Mulley tackling Lady Catherine and Jane Bennett in the same scene, the actors faced a unique challenge.
Many of the actors met that challenge by adopting distinct physicalities to distinguish their portrayals.
“For me, I rooted a lot of my character work in different physicalities and finding different postures,” Mulley said. “And different registers for the voice for all of the different characters. Everything started from a physicality that’s not quite but almost like a caricature, and then I softened that with more of the kind of theoretical character.”
Other actors focused on the voice and allowed the physicality to flow from there.
“I have Mrs. Bennett, and I play her the most,” Griffith said. “She’s just a firecracker. But then you are faced with this other fact that there are these women that aren’t necessarily youthful. They’re all just kind of in this nebulous, middle ground, and how do you differentiate? And so that’s where I went to the voice. When you attach those voices to that character, then when you start speaking in that voice, you’re there.”
The comedy is either more concentrated in the second act, or I became more comfortable with the actors and the conventions they presented. It takes some getting used to, but the show allows its audience members to appreciate new dimensions and even consider some of the long-debated questions that surround the novel.
“When you go to a play, as an audience member, your responsibility is to meet the play halfway,” Matsos said. “It doesn’t exist, just to entertain you at where you are. It expects you to come on a journey with it. And so I think our responsibility as audience members is to ask what a production is trying to do, and evaluate it accordingly.”
In true Jane Austen fashion, the women are the stars of this show. They are brilliant, natural, classically beautiful, and graceful even in the dialogue and choices that are meant to put them in an unflattering light.
Due to the consistent fourth wall breakage, the show doesn’t really allow for a full suspension of disbelief. It’s best not to expect transportation but, rather, an invitation —n invitation both the women and the men in the cast make it difficult not to accept.
“I think ‘Pride and Prejudice’ can be kind of hard to get into for a lot of modern audiences,” senior Marc Sherman said. “I remember having to read and study it when I was like a freshman in high school, and I just didn’t care. But I think the way this plays written allows us to comment on the story as we’re expressing it in this new way that we are able to make our own. That whole process made me kind of fall in love with the story.”
One of the most, if not the most, stunning additions to this play is the presence of Jane Austen herself, played by Mulley. She writes letters to her family, delivers advice, and stands her ground while the ensemble speculates about and celebrates her.
“Those letters and the story that starts to unveil itself of Jane Austen’s life, and the trajectory it took, and then the story of ‘Pride and Prejudice’ and the trajectory Lizzy’s life takes, the parallels, the differences, and the way they inform each other is so meaningful,” Mulley said. “By the time you get to the end of the play, I’m choked up at the end of every night because it ends with Jane Austen’s words.”
The play still makes me want to write letters, to go on walks, and to fall in love; it still has moments of investment -– confrontations and engagement alike, like the original does. But it also reminds the audience of the deeper context and connections that fuel the telling and retelling of this timeless story.
“‘Pride@Prejudice’ captures the spirit of Austen by analyzing and taking apart the scenes we have seen dozens of times,” senior student dramaturg Grace Bryant said in the playbill as a part of her dramaturg’s note. “The merch plugs, chat room interruptions, and role-changing of the actors let us see that ‘Pride and Prejudice’ is not a stuffy drama but a vivacious spectacle of human beauty and human error.”