Honoring a passionate rebel
Director inspired as a teen by ‘Jane Eyre’
For theater artist KJ Sanchez, directing the upcoming Milwaukee Repertory Theater production of Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre” isn’t just an opportunity to immerse herself in a famed adaptation of this groundbreaking novel, which has inspired more than two dozen films, musicals, operas and ballets as well as a symphony.
It’s also a chance to repay a debt incurred when she first read “Jane Eyre” at 13.
“‘Jane Eyre’ was incredibly important to me as a teenaged girl,” Sanchez said, speaking by phone from Austin during a break in a new play festival at the University of Texas, where she is an associate professor.
“I was a geeky weird girl who didn’t know how to be charming and cute. I was opinionated. I couldn’t find my way, and all the heroines I was reading about were charming and beautiful. Jane was a revolutionary who wasn’t afraid to speak her mind. She gave me permission to be myself.”
‘Mad woman’ in the attic
Much like her famous heroine, Brontë struggled all her life to be herself and speak her mind within the constricting Victorian world in which she lived.
“For a Victorian woman to express her passionate nature is to invite the severest of punishment,” wrote Polly Teale in a program note 20 years ago, when her adaptation of “Jane Eyre” premiered at the Young Vic in London. “Jane must keep her fiery spirit locked away if she is to survive.”
“Jane Eyre” offers an object lesson for women who fail to toe the line, giving us the famed mad woman in the attic: Bertha Mason, locked up as insane by her husband, Edward Rochester. Jane — orphaned, homely, poor and abused as well as intelligent, passionate, rebellious and outspoken — falls for Rochester, not realizing that he’s already married and that mad Bertha is his wife.
In creating the adaption we’ll see at the Rep, Teale’s ingenious idea involved seeing and staging Bertha as Jane’s double rather than treating her as Jane’s opposite.
Bertha “is both dangerous and exciting,” Teale wrote in 1997. “She is passionate and sexual. She is angry and violent. She is the embodiment of everything Jane, a Victorian woman, must never be. She is perhaps everything that Brontë feared in herself and longed to express.”
In Teale’s adaptation, Bertha shadows and haunts Jane, giving voice to all that Jane cannot or dare not say, until she is locked up much as Jane herself had been as a child. Even then, Bertha will not be silenced; as she expresses what Jane feels, the audience will witness Jane visibly restraining herself, much as her corset constrains her body and her movement.
“We used clothes as close to the real clothes that would have then been worn as possible,” Sanchez said of the costume design by Rachel Anne Healy. “All of the actresses, for example, are wearing corsets. We wanted to enclose women in clothing reflecting the confining expectations that they live and experience.”
Finding Jane
For all that, Jane makes herself heard, and not just through soliloquies that Sanchez describes as “Shakespearean.”
Central to Teale’s expressionist vision — as espoused by Shared Experience, the Londonbased theater company that staged “Jane Eyre” and of which Teale remains artistic director — is the importance of subjective experience, even if what a character feels doesn’t correlate with the objective world that character encounters.
In the Rep production — a collaboration with Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, where it debuted last month — that subjective reality is reflected in the modernist set: a largely empty space with ramps leading toward the room where Bertha is confined. Boxes are used to create tables and chairs. The 10-actor cast embodies inanimate objects as well as dozens of characters.
Sanchez notes that there are functional and thematic reasons for such a set.
“We couldn’t get caught up in using a turntable, or in questions of whether to bring on a chair or a bed,” Sanchez said. “Verisimilitude is a slippery slope, and we need to be able to move quickly without trying to recreate the many settings in which this story unfolds.” Teale’s fast-moving script includes 38 scenes, and still necessarily leaves a lot out from Brontë’s long novel.
“The audience will learn where we are through behavior and dialogue rather than through what they see from the physical set,” Sanchez said of this non-naturalistic approach to storytelling. “Actors will sing songs. They’ll play instruments; percussion, for example, will convey Jane’s heartbeat. Movement will convey some of what she feels.”
Sanchez envisions the abstract, modern set as reflecting something of who Jane appears to be: Plain, seemingly featureless, empty and waiting for others to fill in the details. The naturalistic clothing underscores all the ways Jane and other Victorian women are confined. The cast’s movement and music will suggest what Jane feels and cannot express.
Freeing Jane
In very different ways, the three plays Sanchez previously directed for the Rep — “The Diary of Anne Frank” (2012), “Noises Off” (2013) and “Harvey” (2014) — each reflect tensions similar to those one sees in “Jane Eyre”: Between necessity and invention. Rule and spontaneity. The expected and the surprising. Convention and freedom.
Or, if you will, the tension between all the ways we’re claustrophobically locked down and shut in, standing in contrast to the power of the imagination — tirelessly reshaping who and what we are while suggesting all we might yet be so that we’re empowered to become our best selves.
As Sanchez noted, imagining oneself free of imprisoning circumstances and conforming pressures remains more challenging for women.
“While we’ve evolved in so many ways, we’re still holding women to a different set of rules,” Sanchez said. “There’s a short distance separating Jane Eyre from Hillary Clinton.”
“If men could see us as we really are, they would be a little amazed,” Brontë wrote in “Shirley,” a novel published two years after “Jane Eyre.” Might Sanchez’s production free Jane to stand up and be fully herself? Will we learn to see her as she really is? Might the Jane Eyre we meet at the Rep teach us how to better read a great novel like “Jane Eyre”?