A few months ago, I was lucky enough to see a very enjoyable and ingenious stage production of Sense and Sensibility, performed in New York by the off-Broadway Bedlam theater company. After a spring vacation of sorts, performances resume next week, and WCSI, a Fox Radio station, recently interviewed playwright Kate Hamill, who also plays Marianne Dashwood.
In the interview, Hamill talks about how she began writing plays after realizing, as she lived on ramen noodles while making the rounds of New York auditions, how few stage roles were written by and for women, even though women make up the majority of theatergoers.
Hamill’s S&S emphasizes the funny side of Austen, and the price is some loss of emotional intensity. But the comedy is highly entertaining. Much Austen dialogue, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, is preserved. Furniture and props are mounted on casters and shoved into position from one end of the stage to the other – including in a memorable dinner-party scene in which actors simultaneously playing two different characters careen from one end of the table to the other without missing a beat. The undisguised artifice of the staging plays like a wry commentary on the artificiality of the manners on display.
The play has scored excellent reviews, including from many Janeites. “Those are my people,” Hamill tells her interviewer, Jane Metzler. “I’m very pleased that the Austenites like it. When I was first working on this, I thought, ‘If I don’t do this right, they’ll come after me with pitchforks.’ ” (Oh, honey – you were always safe. There’s so much Austen-related dreck out there that we can’t take the time to give everyone the pitchfork treatment.)
Hamill’s play, with a different cast but the same director, will be staged at the Folger Shakespeare Theatre in Washington D.C. this fall; a Sunday matinee is one of the special events on offer during the annual general meeting of the Jane Austen Society of North America. And in the interview, Hamill announces good news for Janeites: apparently she’s already working on adaptations of Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey.