"Pride and Prejudice"
Through June 22
Geva Theatre Center, 75 Woodbury Blvd
232-GEVA, gevatheatrecenter.org
Adapting a great novel to the stage is much trickier than it looks, especially when the original is as beloved and as lacking in theatrics as Jane Austen's "Pride & Prejudice." The most recent of numerous stabs at "P&P" had its world premiere at Geva Theatre Center last weekend. The adaptors, Geva's Dramaturg Marge Betley and Artistic Director Mark Cuddy, have usually pruned the long novel judiciously while preserving Austen's language.
The play, like the novel, trades in love of family as well as the need to marry. It never fears to let a fool demonstrate his folly, nor does it flinch from suggesting the depths of passion beneath the characters' rigid propriety. Betley and Cuddy have been wise enough to borrow much of the dialogue word-for-word from the novel, because they know that Austen's authority - like her humor and her brilliantly nuanced characterizations - resides in her distinctive language. Lose that and you lose everything.
The adaptation's main problem lies in keeping a work made largely of conversation and correspondence moving forward onstage. Scenic Designer G.W. Mercier has helped enormously by creating video projections that replace a conventional set. They advance the scenes in a fluid, cinematic way, and place the Bennets in a larger world of open landscapes and great country houses. But they can't compensate for everything. Cuddy and Bentley cut some scenes so drastically that they lose their point, and the reading of a crucial letter aloud near the end slows the action just as it should accelerate.
Everything springs initially from Austen's iconic opening sentence: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." The ensuing story follows the genteel but poor Bennet family, blessed with five daughters and cursed with no dowry for any of them. It focuses especially on the good and lovely Jane and also the intelligent, outspoken Elizabeth, who must eventually overcome both pride and prejudice to find happiness. Enter the equally prideful and prejudiced Mr. Darcy, who is initially the object of Elizabeth's scorn but ultimately her deepest love.
Betley and Cuddy get all that, but then Cuddy in his role as director tosses it away by pandering to his audience. He reduces crucial characters to self-indulgent vulgarity. The Bennets' fawning cousin, Mr. Collins, played by the mincing Randy Rollison, can be very funny, but Cuddy encourages him to break the cardinal rule of comedy: if something is funny, you don't need to make it funny; you need only let it be funny. Rollasin does everything but take a pie in the face and shpritz seltzer down his trousers. Similarly, Peggy Cosgrave is so colossally wrongheaded, so staggeringly lacking in warmth and nuance as Mrs. Bennet, that her bray of a voice made my earlobes curl every time she entered. She also kept forgetting her accent. Finally, Adam Green was badly miscast as the good-spirited, decent Mr. Bingley, who falls in love with Jane but who emerges as little more than a twerp. What could the sensible Jane have been thinking?!
Thank goodness Meghan Wolf and David Christopher Wells portray Elizabeth and Darcy with such solidity and intelligence. Their confrontations feel true, and we sense their inner struggles through problems of family, connections, and fortune - the keys to a good marriage in their world - before they can articulate their love and embrace their rare good fortune. Without them - and without Jane Austen's superb ear for the alternating grace and iron of English - it would have been a much longer night in the theater.