Matchmaking Games

Review of Pride and Prejudice, Long Wharf Theatre

Jane Austen’s much admired novel Pride and Prejudice got the Kate Hamill treatment in 2017. Hamill, trained as an actor, starred in new plays she adapted from old properties, allowing her, in the latter years of this decade, to assay three great heroines of British fiction: Marianne Dashwood (Sense & Sensibility), Becky Sharp (Vanity Fair), and Lizzy Bennet (Pride & Prejudice), as reconceived by her comic skills. The latter play, sans Hamill and directed by Jess McLeod, occupies the slot reserved for “a modern adaptation of a classic play” in the Long Wharf Theatre’s current season. In fact it’s a revival of a contemporary play adapted from a classic novel with some of the verve for skewering the 19th century that one finds, for instance, in the first act of Caryl Churchill’s Cloud 9. (From 1979, Cloud 9 was performed at Yale School of Drama in 2013 and Hartford Stage in 2017.)

Jane Bennet (Octavia Chavez-Richmond), Lizzy Bennet (Aneisa J. Hicks), Charlotte Lucas (Rami Margron) in Pride and Prejudice at Long Wharf Theatre, 2019

I was put in mind of the latter play by P&P’s use of comical casting, or casting against the grain. In Cloud 9, whoever plays the happy Victorian hunter and man of the house in Act One has to play a modern female child in Act Two. There, the doubling is mostly a jab at music hall comedy (men in female clothing having been trusted to raise guffaws for centuries). Here, when a very tall male (Luis Mareno) plays silly aristocrat Bingley as well as Mary, the most ill-favored of the Bennet clan (the third of four girls rather than Austen’s five), the hoary comic trope still lands, determined to inspire cheap laughs.

However, thanks to what Mareno does with the role, the doubling has perhaps something more behind it. Mareno makes Mary a loose cannon of odd asides, sad/funny bids for attention, and the kind of note-taking that family members readily store against others (“you locked me in a closet,” as a multivalent line, cuts more each time Mary says it). Likewise, the fact that whoever plays Mr. Bennet also plays Charlotte, the friend of Lizzy who takes one for the team by marrying unctuous Mr. Collins (Brian Lee Huynh, more later), lends a kind of paternalism to Charlotte and BFF status to Mr. Bennet. Here both roles are played by Rami Margron with notable command of both feminine and masculine registers.

Mary Bennet (Luis Moreno) in Pride and Prejudice at Long Wharf Theatre

The cross-casting is intrinsic to Hamill’s conception, letting the play step nimbly amongst the ruins of gender roles that performativity would have us progress beyond. What might push the theatrical effect a step further? All the cross-gender roles are ancillary. It’s still a story of boy, cast as such, meets girl, cast as such. While there’s no way anyone would mistake this for a faithful rendering of Austen, we don’t get anything really surprising either. At the Long Wharf, Pride and Prejudice is a comedy of manners where the posh British tones of classic Austen have been dismissed as mannered while the nonwhite cast is left to veer among mannerisms. How funny you find that I leave to you.

In my view, who fares best in this production—which is never quite as rollicking as it seems to hope it is (pacing!)—is Brian Lee Huynh. The actor has an always comical grasp of how to exploit the manner of each of his three parts. As the supercilious Miss Bingley—she detests those Bennet girls—Huynh might be a catty male in drag or a catty female past bloom (and dares you to tell the difference); as the caddish but sympathetic Mr. Wickham, he’s part comic villain, part dashing lead, and part ironic commentary on both, and as Mr. Collins, a poseur poised to marry at his patroness’s dictate, he’s divertingly daffy. In each role, both Austen and Hamill are well served. Well played.

Lydia (Dawn Elizabeth Clements), Mr. Wickham (Brian Lee Huynh) in Pride and Prejudice at Long Wharf Theatre

Elsewhere, the effects are more grab-bag, but Act Two lands better than Act One. The latter has not one but two grand balls where the lack of extras makes space itself seem to hang, while at home the fond rapport between Mr. Bennet and Lizzy (a linchpin of the novel) barely registers. Margron’s Mr. B. really comes into his own in Act Two when suitors come thick and fast. Jane Bennet (Octavia Chavez-Richmond), who’s supposed to be “the catch,” seems to be the rather tepid lover Darcy takes her for, early on. Chavez-Richmond has more fun with Miss Anne De Burgh’s neurasthenic quaver and a fantasy of Jane as temptress, both in Act Two. As Mr. Darcy, Biko Eisen-Martin does haughtily awkward well and bursts into pained eloquence in Act Two with force enough to melt even the skepticism of Lizzy, we imagine.  As Lizzy, Aneisa J. Hicks, ever-arrayed in patterned culottes, seems willfully obtuse in Act One, but her passions and bashfulness come to the fore in Act Two (after Darcy does her a service and she gets to see the dude’s sumptuous domicile). And yet the pair’s happy-ever-after kiss is all but spoiled by the bad matches made by Charlotte and by Lydia.

As the youngest (fourteen), Lydia is played by Dawn Elizabeth Clements as a sitcom princess, all cutesy girlish sashay in Act One; in Act Two she reappears as the Mean Girl/Dame, Lady De Burgh, and, while Lydia’s ultimate comeuppance seems way harsh, Clements is at her best in making us register the heart-shaking incomprehension of the child-bride. As Mrs. Bennet, for whom railroading her daughters into the best possible marriages is the key to success, Maria Elena Ramirez is never as vacuous as the role is generally deemed (even by Austen, I daresay). Her gravitas comes from preemptive mourning over her girls’ missed chances, a sort of memento mori for the death-in-life that yawns when marriageability ends.

Lizzy Bennet (Aneisa J. Hicks), Jane Bennet (Octavia Chavez-Richmond), Mrs. Bennet (Maria Elena Remirez), Mary Bennet (Luis Moreno), Lydia Bennet (Dawn Elizabeth Clements), Mr. Bennet (Rami Margron) in Pride and Prejudice at Long Wharf Theatre

Costumes, by Izumi Inaba, are a riot of patterns and overlays on female characters that seem designed not to flatter their wearers (more of that against the grain aesthetic, I assume), though the male costumes generally do. The set by Gerardo Díaz Sánchez features a handsome staircase and ballroom/sitting-room—with a décor like a bordello on acid. Sound Designer/Original Music Composer Megumi Katayama’s boomy rhythms come through loud and clear but the dialogue at times less so amidst all the movement.

The Long Wharf’s Pride and Prejudice takes pride in overcoming any prejudices about who is able to play whom. Fine, but it could be much funnier.

Pride and Prejudice
By Kate Hamill
Adapted from the novel by Jane Austen
Directed by Jess McLeod

Set Design: Gerardo Díaz Sánchez; Costume Design: Izumi Inaba; Lighting Design: Jennifer Fok; Original Music & Sound Design: Megumi Katayama; Choreography: James Beaudry; Hair, Wig & Make Up Design: Samantha Abbott; Production Stage Manager: Kelsey Vivian; Assistant Stage Manager: Amy Patricia Stern; Casting by Calleri Casting

Cast: Octavia Chavez-Richmond, Dawn Elizabeth Clements, Biko Eisen-Martin, Aneisa J. Hicks, Brian Lee Huynh, Rami Margron, Luis Moreno, Maria Elena Remirez

 Long Wharf Theatre
November 27-December 22, 2019

One Ring to Rule Them All

Review of The Engagement Party, Hartford Stage

Dinner parties never seem to go well onstage. The assembled characters are bound to find some cause for friction that will defeat the best-intentioned bonhomie. Think only of two plays produced last season at Hartford Stage: Sarah Gancher’s Seder and Athol Fugard’s A Lesson from Aloes. Though Samuel Baum’s The Engagement Party, currently in its world premiere there, doesn’t quite launch us into the contested waters of those two predecessors, it does live up to the expectation that the thin veneer of social cheer will be cracked and warped and all but destroyed by evening’s end.

There is entertainment in watching that happen—if only because Baum’s characters are so insular in their attitudes—but the play’s insistence on a whodunit moment (or, more properly, a “was something done?”) creates a catalyst that leaves a bit to be desired. Maybe I’d just like to think better of everyone gathered here than they do of each other, or maybe it’s that Baum, and director Darko Tresjnak, want characters we can “suspect” rather than characters we can expect to be complicated.

Haley (Anne Troup), Kai (Brian Lee Huynh), Conrad (Richard Bekins), Gail (Mia Dillon), Katherine (Beth Riesgraf), Alan (Teddy Bergman), Josh (Zach Appelman) in the world premiere of The Engagement Party at Hartford Stage (photos by T. Charles Erickson)

Josh (Zach Appelman) and Catherine (Beth Riesgraf) are a well-to-do couple in a swanky Manhattan townhouse, its living and dining areas’ comfortable modernism perfectly established by Alexander Dodge’s enthralling set, which spins to reveal a showcase kitchen—with an incredibly high ceiling inferred—and, later, a second floor bedroom we see through a picture window. Each space is more enclosed than the last, and that makes for an escalating sense of claustrophobia as the partyers find themselves looking over each other’s shoulders and trying to catch hints of the conversation walked in upon.

The guests are: Catherine’s parents, Conrad (Richard Bekins), a fit septuagenarian, and his wife Gail (Mia Dillon), who disdains sporting a needed crutch; Haley (Anne Troup), much frumpier than her friend Catherine, and her husband Kai (Brian Lee Huynh), Josh’s not-as-successful colleague. The two younger couples have been mutual friends since college—Harvard—along with Alan (Teddy Bergman), the intellectual of the bunch who now teaches at Columbia and disdains the trappings of wealth that his former classmates are so keen on curating. But he’s not the real odd-man-out: that role is filled, with jocular, working-class machismo, by Johnny (Brian Patrick Murphy), a childhood friend of Josh’s who knew him when.

Johnny (Brian Patrick Murphy), Josh (Zach Appelman), Katherine (Beth Riesgraf), Conrad (Richard Bekins), Gail (Mia Dillon), Kai (Brian Lee Huynh), Alan (Teddy Bergman), Haley (Anne Troup)

The revelations that come out about what the characters are hiding or lying about deserve to be preserved from spoilers, but the reliance on a misplaced—and insanely costly—engagement ring as the evening’s turning point spoiled what had looked to be a play in which we get to see what friends of long-standing say about one another when one or another is out of the room. That play gets swept away, more or less, by an extended investigation of suspicion that traps the characters (for a time) as though in a “lite” version of The Exterminating Angel. When Alan—whom Teddy Bergman plays with captivating dryness—leaves the party, close behind tearful Haley and exasperated Kai, I was quite sorry to see him go and wished we could follow him to some other destination where he might continue to add interest to the evening.

Katherine (Beth Riesgraf), Kai (Brian Lee Huynh), Alan (Teddy Bergman), Josh (Zach Appelman)

Back inside, the drama unfolding between the sophisticated elder couple and their vapid daughter and up-from-Canarsie son-in-law-to-be escalates to near violence. Johnny—important if only because he knows the backstory that Josh has told no one—heads out for coffee, inviting Josh for a dialogue that never occurs. Pity, but the host can’t leave until the expensive engagement ring’s whereabouts are determined.

The revelation you might be expecting—Baum is the author of The Wizard of Lies, the gripping story of Bernie Madoff, and the play is set, deliberately we imagine, in 2007, just about when the lie that was our nation’s economy was exposed—doesn’t materialize. That’s too “Noughts”; the exposures of the “Teens” have been “Me-Too” moments, so think along those lines.

Katherine (Beth Riesgraf), Josh (Zach Appelman)

 The women here are mostly engaged in low-key reaction—with the always excellent Mia Dillon almost entirely wasted—though Catherine eventually gets to vent at her parents and husband. She may be the one we sympathize with most, but since she has cluelessly not divined much about the men in her life, we can only go so far with that. As Josh, Zach Appelman has to go from grabby husband to alienated son-in-law to awkward boss-friend-host (of Kai) to embarrassed chum (of Johnny), and eventually to hyper, almost paranoid, frenemy to everyone and, at last, hero egregiously wronged while also still wronging. We might think better of him were it not that he seems to understand himself so little.

Conrad (Richard Bekins), Katherine (Beth Riesgraf), Gail (Mia Dillon), Josh (Zach Appelman)

The others do what they can with what they’ve got. Bekins, in his confrontation scene with Josh, plays concerned pater convincingly until the unsavory past is thrown in his face (with Baum stacking the deck with not one, not two, but three wrongs!). The scene comes undone well, but there’s nowhere the play can go after that. Fortunately, it doesn’t have much longer to go.

Brian Lee Huynh keeps things lively as Kai who is, in his own eyes, the most put-upon person present; as Haley, Anne Troup plays distraught well, but never gets to have a scene alone with her friend Catherine. Teddy Bergman’s Alan is spot-on, including recalcitrant hair, and Brian Patrick Murphy gives Johnny the touch of soul that no one else here has any inkling of.

Up until the fateful wine spill a third of the way through this quick 85-minute play, I was engaged by The Engagement Party, thereafter not so much. Some viewers will be sustained by the low order curiosity concerning what became of that much admired ring. If you must know, go!

Gail (Mia Dillon)

The Engagement Party
By Samuel Baum
Directed by Darko Tresnjak

Scenic Design: Alexander Dodge; Costume Design: Joshua Pearson; Lighting Design: Matthew Richards; Sound Design: Jane Shaw; Fight Choreographer: Greg Webster; Dramaturg: Elizabeth Williamson; Casting: Laura Stancyzk, CSA; Production Stage Manager: Robyn M. Zalewski; Assistant Stage Manager: Whitney M. Keeter; Production Manager: Bryan T. Holcombe; General Manager: Emily Van Scoy; Associate Artistic Director: Elizabeth Williamson

Cast: Zach Appelman, Richard Bekins, Teddy Bergman, Mia Dillon, Brian Lee Huynh, Brian Patrick Murphy, Beth Riesgraf, Anne Troup

Hartford Stage
January 10-February 3, 2019