Sense & Sensibility by Jane Austen (review)

Directed by Bedlam’s founding artistic director Eric Tucker, the production of Sense & Sensibility presented at The Gym at Judson was a delight for both the Austen-initiated and uninitiated. Cast members prepared for the show at lighted makeup tables positioned at one end of the alley-configured playing space in view of the audience. Once prepped and sporting contemporary outerwear over nineteenth-century-inspired garb, they roamed about the space, engaging audience members with a few words or inviting looks. With Pharrell Williams’s “Come Get It Bae” playing, they then proceeded to perform a contemporary dance that, after the actors removed the outer layer of their costumes, switched instantaneously to period movement, thus emphasizing the production’s interest in reinvigorating Austen’s text for contemporary audiences.

The company of Bedlam’s Sense & Sensibility. (Photo: Gregory Costanzo.)

The tradition of adapting literature for the stage has a long and rich history. George Aiken’s rendering of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin demonstrated early on that popular novels could yield popular plays. The challenges of adapting a novel to the stage are many, as adapters must identify the essential conflicts and characters in a literary work and often distill hundreds of pages into two hours or so of performance. An added challenge for Kate Hamill, the adapter of Sense & Sensibility, was the imperative to communicate the novel’s contemporary relevance for an audience two hundred-plus years older than Austen’s own. Hamill’s adaptation and Tucker’s direction met these challenges by adopting a lively point of view conveyed through inventive and fast-paced staging, and by keying in on the chaos created in a society that turns on “fake news.”

One prominent force driving this production was a shake-up of Austen’s narrative perspective. In her telling of the Dashwood sisters’ story, Elinor, the paragon of good sense, is the primary eye through which we see the makings of good matches, and it is Elinor’s reserve that is reflected throughout Austen’s narration. By contrast, Elinor’s younger sister, Marianne, is the picture of romantic sensibility and wears her passions for all to see. Austen’s third-person narrator describes Marianne as “eager in everything,” and it was the spirit of Marianne that imbued Bedlam’s production. The performance was marked by expeditious transitions, accomplished with rolling furniture and actors easily passing from one character to the next. Sometimes a single character was shared by more than one actor. A tiara and some gnawing at a pantomimed chicken leg told us that Lady Middleton was with us, regardless of which actor was playing her in any given moment. This fluid passing of one character from actor to actor is a convention that Tucker successfully employed in two of Bedlam’s earliest productions: Shaw’s St. Joan and Shakespeare’s Hamlet, both played by Bedlam’s founding cast of four. The use of the convention had a similar impact in Sense & Sensibility, as it allowed a cast of ten to bring before us a panorama of characters (including horses); it also supplied the production with a sense of playfulness that show-cased the actors‘ agility and creativity.

The company of Bedlam’s Sense & Sensibility. (Photo: Gregory Costanzo.)

For all of the fun that we had with Marianne and some of the novel’s equally boisterous characters, one of the greatest treats of this production was the moment when all of the frantic giddiness stopped. When the production reached what is the climax of Austen’s novel—the long-awaited union of Elinor and Edward—it gifted us with something that the novel does not. What Austen discreetly summarizes, Hamill put before our eyes: Elinor and Edward’s heartfelt profession of their long-concealed love. The role of Elinor, originally played by Bedlam cofounder Andrus Nichols, was now embodied by Kelley Curran, and the...