Theater: ‘Miss Bennet’ a worthy sequel.
Skokie, Ill. — Poor Mary. A classic middle child, the third of five Bennet sisters only receives a dozen or so mentions in Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.” They’re not flattering. She may be an avid reader and accomplished musician, but she also projects as preachy and humorless.
A seemingly sure spinster in the making, she’s cut altogether from some stage adaptations.
But not from Lauren Gunderson and Margot Melcon’s delightful “Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley,” now receiving its world premiere at Northlight Theatre under Jessica Thebus’ direction. It’s Mary who is thus referenced in the title, and this imagined sequel to “Pride and Prejudice” is her love story.
Set just a few years after Darcy comes to his senses and marries Lizzie, “Miss Bennet” unfolds in the days preceding Christmas within two handsome rooms of the Darcy estate.
The expansive drawing room features one of those newfangled German decorations called a Christmas tree.
This being Mary’s story, it adjoins a well-appointed library.
That’s where Mary meets the equally bookish and comically clumsy Arthur de Bourgh, who has inherited the family estate following Lady Catherine’s recent death.
Will these mutual geeks find happiness with each other?
Or will Arthur do what’s expected of him and marry Anne, the imperious Lady Catherine’s equally formidable daughter?
This being a Gunderson play, you can rest assured that in answering such questions, Austen’s proto-feminist narrative gets mined for all it’s worth, even as the script simultaneously retains Austen’s sharply playful and archly funny tone.
An illustrative example: Scene transitions are marked by sped-up vignettes involving the ritualistic social niceties that Austen fans love.
A footman and maid dash about at the same breakneck speed used by the principals to drink and dance, enter and exit.
It’s farcically funny. But it also exposes the silliness within such formal proprieties, which in turn makes room for questioning the equally hidebound conventions involving how men and women should relate to one another.
Mary is the perfect choice to suggest how such conventions might be altered.
A few years older than the girl we meet in “Pride and Prejudice,” she’s grown into a woman who, as Darcy rightly tells her, is vaguely reminiscent of Lizzie.
As embodied by a wonderful Emily Berman, Mary is more astringent than her older sister, but she’s equally independent and, now, also more vulnerable than she once was; much as she loves her books and piano, she’s also lonely. She opens the play by asking through a letter whether one can live a large life in the mind while remaining alone.
Mary is willing to do so, if she must. But Berman conveys the slightly sad air of a woman who’d prefer to live her life with someone else. What she won’t do is settle just so she can be married — even if she shares the fear Austen’s single women continually betray, involving how they will survive in a man’s world.
One variation on that theme gets played out by Lydia (Jennifer Latimore), whose marriage with the rakish Wickham is in trouble; while Lydia can still be the bratty flirt we meet in Austen, Latimore also suggests the underlying panic and emptiness of an older and humbler woman.
A second variation is sounded by Anne de Bourgh; Bri Sudia ranges from a nearly cartoonish version of
Anne’s impossible mother to the moving depiction of a woman wanting to become someone else but not knowing how — any more than she can admit to herself that she’s lost.
Profiling these women’s lives, the playwrights make less room for the Bingleys and Darcys; they already have their own story, after all. This worthy successor — absolutely worth the
short drive south — enables the long-overdue revenge of the nerds.