HOLIDAY PLAY OFFERS HUMAN FOIBLES AS GIFT UNDER THE TREE
Romantic comedy of manners inspired by spirit of Jane Austen
It’s hard to imagine a more perfect holiday confection than Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley.
Written by Lauren Gunderson (“the most produced living playwright in America,” the playbill assures us) and Margot Melcon, the 2016 play is a sequel of sorts to Pride and Prejudice. The script is clever, self-aware, contemporary, and, finally, heartwarming. In the hands of the right team, as it is here, it’s magic.
Miss Bennet picks up two years after the end of the events of Jane Austen’s 1813 novel. The former Lizzy Bennet (Lauren Jackson) is living in domestic bliss with Mr. Darcy. It’s Christmastime, and the whole Bennet clan is descending on the Darcys’ Pemberley estate. Preceding the parents are three of Lizzy’s sisters: Jane (Leslie Dos Remedios), pregnant with the child of Darcy’s friend Bingley; Lydia (Baraka Rahmani), who is married to an absent Mr. Wickham; and Mary (Kate Dion-Richard), the Miss Bennet of the title. Mary’s bookish ways cast doubts on her prospects for marriage, a concern for all and the biggest problem facing the Bennets this holiday season.
Fortunately, love is always on the horizon in an Austen drawing room. Enter Mr. Arthur de Bourgh (Matthew MacDonald-Bain).
The death of de Bourgh’s aunt has left Arthur landed gentry, a change in status that makes the already effervescent Lydia “shameless” in her giddiness, as Mary puts it.
Lydia, who insists on how “miserably happy” her marriage to Mr. Wickham is, is actually miserably miserable. But it’s Arthur and Mary — who bond over geography and evolution — who are meant for each other. First, though, they’ll have to overcome a misunderstanding or two.
Roy Surrette directs in a manner that respects yet plays up the story’s conventions. At one point, the characters engage in a fun little pantomime with two copies of the same book that Arthur and Mary are reading. At the end-of-first-act reveal, all onstage turn to the audience with playing-to-the-backrows expressions of shock.
Although the characters are confined to the drawing room (or, as Anne refers to it, “the tree room”; Lizzy’s decision to adopt a then-new German custom of setting up a spruce indoors is cause for much mockery), the ever-changing arrangements of characters — whether all the sisters, or all the men, or just our two romantic leads — keep the action moving. The room’s atmosphere fluctuates from scene to scene with help from lighting designer Conor Moore, composer Heather Kemsky, and set designer Ted Roberts (who gives us a shifting backdrop glimpsed through the room’s window). Costumer Amy McDougall’s work will have audiences longing for the days of waistcoats and allday evening gowns.
MacDonald-Bain plays de Bourgh with open-mouthed perplexity and charming awkwardness. As Mary Bennet, Dion-Richard straddles the line between an unsure bookworm who is, as she says, “suffering from a lack of definition,” and confident young woman. The actor gets laughs from just a well-placed pout or eyebrow raise.
Rahmani captures Lydia’s determined but ultimately hollow cheerfulness with great good humour; you can’t help loving the poor deluded soul.
As the main “villainess” of the piece, Carmela Sison has the least sympathetic role. But even Anne gets her moment of redemption: this is a holiday production, after all.
Chris Walters and Tim Carlson, as Mr. Darcy and his slightly obtuse friend Bingley, also have their moments of depicting typically Austenian human foibles. As Darcy, Walters gets one of the best lines: “We are gentlemen, Bingley,” he tells his friend with great authority. “We sit and wait for the excitement to come to us.”
They do, and it does.