I’ve enjoyed Erik Tucker’s work with Bedlam for years, most recently his fun mash up of Shakespeare’s Roman plays with Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, and I, like Tim Teeman in the NY Times, remember the company’s amazing production of “Sense and Sensibility” in 2016. So I was excited to catch a preview of their latest Austen adaptation, a version of Pride and Prejudice called “Are the Bennet Girls OK?” It’s great fun, especially for Austen fans, and very much worth a trip to the Upper West Side before Nov 9.
This adaptation was a little more aggressive than I remember the earlier one being. There’s a bit of an edge to playwright Emily Breeze’s reclamation of the less sympathetic Bennets, especially Mrs. Bennet, played with force and flair by Zuzanna Szadkowski, and the emotionally compelling Mary, played by the playwright’s sister Masha Breeze. Like Teeman in the Times, I was impressed by Mrs Bennet’s stage charisma – she commanded the stage especially early in the production, when she mangled the novel’s famous opening lines, with Austen’s gentle irony and syntactic balance reformulated as a ramble about how “a girl with a sister must be in want of another sister so that they can complain about the first sister…”
As the re-imagining of that famous line suggests, the center of attention in this production stays in the female family. I thought for a while that Mr Bennet might not make an appearance at all – he eventually did arrive, in a lively comic turn by Edoardo Benzoni, who played all the male parts, from lecherous Wickham to tongue-tied Darcy.
But the emotional heart of the show was neither the ferocious mother nor smart and sassy Lizzy, but rather the mostly-overlooked middle sister Mary. Every reasonably careful reader of Austen’s novel knows that the awkward and devout Mary might have imagined herself as a possible match for the odious parish priest Mr Collins, who Lizzy turns down before neighbor Charlotte scoops him up. That plot-not-taken becomes the center of “Are the Bennet Girls OK?”, with Mary’s unattainable love displacing, for me at least, the somewhat predictable developments of the Darcy/Wickham/Bingley plots. When all the men are the same guy, they come to matter less than – as Mrs Bennet’s revision of the opening line has it – what your sisters are saying and feeling.
Masha Breeze’s Mary was off-putting and stilted, but she also possessed greater emotional energy than any of her sisters. She’s the one who feels and knows that she can’t fit in. The dilemma that Mrs Bennet asserts – how can I marry off all these daughters? – becomes for Mary especially a more basic conundrum: how is it possible for someone like me to live in this world?
The pairings pair off as they are meant to in the end, but Lizzy’s final acceptance of Darcy appears to have more to do with his ability to care for the unmarried Bennet girls than any sense of his own worth. Maybe the rich guy can at least keep a few of the sisters happy, even if emotional fulfillment is out of play? It’s a darker stew than Pride and Prejudice usually serves up, but it’s also a compelling re-reading of perhaps English literature’s most beloved comic novel. Like Virgil’s Aeneid and Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, it’s fan fiction – but of a richly disturbing kind.