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The Elliots
Reviewed by Bill Raden
Fremont Centre Theatre
Through June 7
Whether or not the world has been crying out for a new stage adaptation of a major Jane Austen novel, and despite what in the 21st century might be argued as the anachronistic artistic impulse behind such an attempt, playwright A.J. Darby has obliged with The Elliots, her rather severe, two-hour dramatic condensation of Austen’s Persuasion. Unfortunately, neither hardcore Austenites nor casual theatergoers will find much to celebrate in Darby’s rather clumsy effort.
The best stage adaptation of Austen may well be Helen Jerome’s 1935 version of Pride and Prejudice, which was a Broadway hit before becoming the basis for what many still consider the gold standard of Hollywood feature treatments — Robert Z. Leonard’s semi-faithful, 1940 film version, starring Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier.
Persuasion, Austen’s bittersweet romance of lost love regained, is itself no stranger to dramatic transposition, being adapted twice for film and TV during what was a veritable Austen glut of the 1990s and 2000s. And for a novel that achieves much of its character development through internal thoughts and third-person commentary rather than via Austen’s customary, satirically edged dialogue, the camera may well be a more comfortable fit than the stage.
The best thing about director Karissa McKinney’s somewhat awkward and under-imagined staging (on McKinney’s own, vaguely Georgian drawing room set) of the world premiere is the casting of Kelly Lohman as Austen’s spinsterish if commonsensical heroine, Anne Elliiot. Lohman is delightful in the role, both in terms of her accent work and in persuasively winning the audience’s sympathy while conveying the mainly unspoken yearnings and crushing disappointments of the character most responsible for driving the plot-heavy narrative.
Steve Peterson likewise delivers a spot-on impersonation of Sir Walter Elliot, the family’s comically vain, effetely condescending and spendthrift patriarch, while Emily Greco gives a suitably stolid performance as the snobbish Elliot sister Elizabeth, with Jeffrey Nichols and Ryan Young providing capable support as the story’s respective suitors, Captain Benwick and Reverend Hayter. All are elegantly costumed by designer Allison Gorjian.
But those turn out to be exceptions to a production that mostly misses the delicate tone and warmth of Austen’s piercing romantic satire. The absence is most pronounced in Travis Goodman’s Captain Wentworth, Anne’s dashing love interest. The onstage romantic chemistry tends to be almost solely on the part of Lohman, though in Goodman’s defense, so much of his character’s interior life has been ignored by Darby’s script that it’s hard to imagine anybody prevailing in the cripplingly underwritten part.
That omission proves most damaging in Act 2 with the betrothal of Benwick to Louisa Musgrove (a capable Madison Kirkpatrick). By all the rules of the sentimental romance genre that Austen employs as her narrative’s bones, without understanding the depth of Wentworth’s hurt pride at Anne’s jilting of him seven years before, the removal of the Louisa obstacle ends up loudly signaling the story’s happy resolution, stranding the play’s final 30 minutes as so much pointlessly orphaned bathos.
Fremont Centre Theatre, 1000 Fremont Ave., South Pasadena; Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m.; through June 7. (866) 811-4111, www.fremontcentretheatre.com
