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Pride and Prejudice
Reviewed by Paul Birchall
Actors Co-op
Through March 15
In today’s world of “Fifty Shades of Blech,” where young ladies of intelligence and means agree to be subjected to dominating brutes who whack them with neck ties and do terrible things with handcuffs and strings of beads, what a pleasure it is to be reminded of more civilized times, when courtship was about wooing and not about beating. Really, when you think of it, Fifty Shades and Jane Austen’s great novel Pride and Prejudice, with their tales about women finding empowerment through the ministrations of an intimidating, rather grumpy Byronic hero, are similar tales in some respects. It’s just that in the Austen novel, the rumpy pumpy is in the subtext, where it belongs.
“Pride and Prejudice” is such a beloved novel, one is struck by the fact that there are so few stage adaptations. Director Linda Kerns’s pleasantly journeyman production utilizes the sentimental adaptation by Helen Jerome, a venerable iteration of the tale that captures the pleasures of much of Austen’s writing and transposes it to the theatrical dimension. The piece is indeed a little stodgy – the adaptation, not Austen – and we occasionally miss some of the spectacle and emotional heft contained in the novel’s perfect prose.
Like the novel, the play centers on the adventures of the three beguiling Bennet sisters, and the rocky road that leads to their respective marriages. Jane (Ivy Beech) quickly falls for the handsome Mr. Bingley (Brandon Parrish), while impetuous youngest daughter Lydia (Francesca Fromang) is attracted to sleazy soldier Mr. Wickham (Sean McHugh). The play’s focus, though, is on the stormy relationship between oldest sister Elizabeth (Greyson Chadwick) and the grim, cynical Mr. Darcy (Paul Turbiak). Darcy whisks Elizabeth away in his private plane to his secret S and M dungeon and there they…. No, wait, that’s the 2015 50 Shades adaptation: True love here runs more smoothly and less kinkily.
One of the pleasures of any stage adaptation of this great novel is the joy of seeing the famous characters realized “in person” that you’ve only imagined in your mind’s eye while reading. And Kerns’s production smartly uncovers layers of subtext that lurk beneath Jerome’s rather straightforward textual structure. When Catherine Urbanek’s deliciously frosty Miss Bingley, Mr. Bingley’s drolly snobby sister, snarkily insults Beech’s sensitive Jane, we see the brief expression of pain on Jane’s face and realize the jab has connected far more than Miss Bingley realizes.
Similarly when Jennie Fahn’s smilingly venomous Lady Lucas administers one of her character’s trademark insults-with-praise, you actually see Chadwick’s Elizabeth rolling her eyes behind her – it’s hilarious and extremely believable. Beech and Chadwick are delightful as the two older sisters, endowing the adaptation’s somewhat flat personalities with energy and surprising flashes of wisdom and maturity — and just a soupcon of anachronistic snark.
The production is affably cast overall, particularly in the supporting roles. Burch’s wonderfully oafish Mr. Collins, all buck teeth and Jim Carrey-esque eye bugging, is a particular delight, and so is Lori Berg’s exceptionally harridan-rich Lady Catherine de Bourgh. It’s true, we might have wished for more ardent romantic chemistry between Turbiak’s seemingly autistic Darcy and Chadwick’s fiery Elizabeth, but generally, Jerome’s adaptation suffers from a flatness of affect, and we find ourselves realizing (perhaps intentionally) that these relationships are intended as much as economic alliances as they are emotional ones.
Costume designer Vicki Conrad’s gowns are dazzling — you’ve never seen so many gorgeous empire waist-y schmattas in your life – while Michael Kramer’s nicely textured Grecian column pillar-filled set reminds us of pieces of Wedgwood china, with stark white objects up against a wash of background color. Ultimately, this beautifully atmospheric rendering of Austen’s book is mildly marred only by the slight shortcomings of the mildly stilted adaptation – but the pleasures of being once again in the company of Austen’s characters is hard to resist.
Actors Co-op, 1760 N. Gower St, Presbyterian Church of Hollywood; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2:30 p.m.; through March 15. (323) 462-8460, www.actorsco-op.org
