Pride and Prejudice
Pride and Prejudice
Adapted by Jon Jory from the novel by Jane Austin
Directed by Thomas Ouellette
Starring Avery Clark and Michele Vasquez
Orlando Shakespeare Theatre, Orlando, FL</strong><P>
It’s had to get romantic when you need a thesaurus to decode the love notes. People used longer sentences back in Regency England, at least when they attempted to sound “literary.” Perhaps that’s why getting married was as complicated as the minuets they danced for courtship. The Bennet household was particularly difficult to wed; there are 5 daughters and no male heir. Through one of those quirks of English laws the women will get booted if Mr. Bennet (Wynn Harmon) dies, thus his wife (Anne Hering) focuses all her effort on matchmaking. Wondrously, a wealthy, single, attractive, and pleasant neighbor appears – Mr. Bingley (Matt Wenge) “has 4000 pounds a year,” a truly vast sum in 1813. Best of all he’s sweet on the oldest daughter Jane (Courtney Moors) and to be polite she has to wed first. But there’s a snake in the grass, Bingley’s buddy Mr. Darcy (Clark) despises country folks and takes it upon himself to prevent his friends from “marrying badly.” Not only are the Bennet’s broke, entailed, and unknown, he regards them as uncouth and rustic. Daughter #2 Elisabeth (Vazquez) catches Darcy’s eye, but his proposal raises her hackles, and we’re off on a merry-go-round of proposal, rejection, elopement told with syntax that defies easy grammatical analysis.
I can’t say there’s a sexual tension between Elizabeth and Darcy, but they are well matched as warriors. Darcy stalks the stage like a cat out for vengeance on Mus musculua while Elizabeth juggles him like they had already been divorced twice. Mr. Bennet is pleasantly ineffective but offers “I might outlast you after all” when effusive Mrs. B constantly harps on his impending mortality. Colonel Fitzwilliam’s (Christopher Kiley) serves as the story’s McGuffin and read more like a pacifist than an artillery officer. While Elizabeth has some spine, the other daughters merely look cute and hope for the best. Lydia (Kristin Shirilla) is the dizziest of the lot and picks up all the shrill elements of her mother’s dialect while Mary (Brooke M. Haney) buries her nose in a book and hopes Sarah Lawrence College will hurry up and open.
The more convoluted and constricted society becomes, the more is fascinates. Today you pretty much pick out someone you can tolerate, and stick around as long as you can, but two hundred years ago getting sex was more like negotiating a peace treaty. These negotiations intrigue yet leave me feeling that neither love nor sex was the motivation, just commercial potential and leveraging brand names. Everyone dances well and much of the action takes place while the cast moves in elaborate quadrilles choreographed by W. Robert Sherry. The set is simple and versatile, the lighting subtle and the battle formal and planned. Give this couple a few years, and they could reenact “Virginia Wolf” with black powder muskets and a cavalry charge.
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