Immersion

While Hampshire, England, is Ground Zero for Austen 250 celebrations, we Americans are doing our best to participate—and this week, the name of the game is “immersive experience.”

* On Saturday night, a gorgeous eighteenth-century townhouse in Annapolis, Maryland, will host “Behind the Keyboard: Jane Austen’s Musical World,” a concert featuring music that Jane Austen knew, played on an 1806 fortepiano just like the one she owned.

The “immersive concert experience”—candlelight, historic ballroom, newly restored Broadwood, pieces from the Austen family music collection—takes place at the 1774 Hammond-Harwood House Museum. Although the $65-75 ticket price is steepish, it sounds like it will be a lovely evening.

* But if that musical refinement seems a bit tame, perhaps you’d prefer to drop in on “Jane Austen Unscripted: Tea at Pemberley,” which combines improv and tea-drinking in a Burbank, California, garden party-like setting.

 The website of the non-profit Garry Marshall Theatre promises an “immersive experience of sheer entertainment”-- tea, snacks, and a play improvised from audience suggestions and “inspired by the intoxicatingly romantic world of Jane Austen.” Expensive? Pretty much--tickets start at $85--but it sounds fun to me.

Plus, it's immersive! Apparently, if you have to celebrate Austen 250 far from her native haunts, at least you can take a deep dive.