Sarah on theater

Summary This irreverent adaptation of Pride and Prejudice uses contemporary, modern language while maintaining the Regency-era setting, focusing the narrative on the fiercely protective and complex relationships between the Bennet sisters and their mother. The classic story is reframed through a modern lens, reframing the story as a matter of sisterly devotion.

“Pride and Prejudice” adapted to hypermodern vernacular: the unmistakable dialect of the culturally-downstream-of-TikTok millennial/Gen-Z white American woman. Wait, but—no, stoppp—I’m literally obsessed. (I am. I’m the target audience that runs the 1995 miniseries as background noise at home. 🥰) “Are the Bennet Girls Ok?” is modernization done right, I think, but it doesn’t totally deliver on an ambitious vision.

Jane Austen’s original novel occupies sort of a singular spot in the proto-feminist literary canon. Contemporaneously radical for its depiction of young women with agency, it nevertheless feels old-fangled for its Regency-era focus on husband-securing. Playwright Emily Breeze critiques that side of the book by dialing up the emphasis on the inner lives of the women principals—in their own (new) words—with a side effect of better resonating with a modern audience. That’s the idea, anyway. The problem is that the two acts of “Bennet Girls” feel like they come from two separate plays written on that conceit, and the whiplash between the two makes the complete package feel weaker than the sum of its parts.

I actually loved the first act, which is synopsis-faithful but highly abridged. We get a small set of scenes—probably too small to tell the story from scratch, mind you, firmly sealing the play in the realm of literary response—which place the reactions of the women and the conversations between them at the forefront. Interstitial spotlights with dissonant music highlight the discomfort of the women in between scenes. Men enter here and there just to exert directional influence on the story, played hilariously like a feeble stack of Tinder profiles by Edoardo Benzoni, but otherwise it’s not about them. (As Mr. Collins, especially, he was uncannily like a boy we knew in high school; we were dying every time he was on the stage.) What it is is an assertion that the agency of these women is table stakes; that they are, in fact, (generally) rational actors in a hostile world populated by idiots. And it’s witty! And funny!

It’s a bit frustrating, then, that Act 2 is off in the weeds doing something else entirely. Not content with merely refocusing the story, the second half opts to rewrite it entirely, veering into fan fiction. The spotlit interstitials are gone. The centerpiece scene is a wedding that most of the characters didn’t attend in the original story. Some men are written to be extra malicious. Others are abruptly killed off. Mr. Darcy is hardly in it at all. It might be okay to do this comprehensive revision of “Pride & Prejudice” if you committed to the bit—I didn’t hate it in a vacuum—but it feels weird and disorienting after we’ve spent the first half of the show engaged in completely opposite rhetorical tactics. And it comes to a halt with a dance scene that wears its influences (“John Proctor,” Lena Dunham’s “Girls”) a little too proudly.

Quality of performance is generally strong, but can’t bail out the writing inconsistency. Zuzanna Szadkowski is a particular highlight for her well-rounded, pragmatic take on the ordinarily hysterical Mrs. Bennet, and Caroline Grogan is pitch-perfect as the brash Lydia. Masha Breeze, as Mary, clocks in as the tropey trans-woman-as-butt-of-the-joke (a time-honored, disappointing tradition), seemingly cast for her relation to the playwright more than for any ability to bring pathos to the role.

Staging is effective. This is quietly one of the nicer off-Broadway spaces, upstairs in a church, and I love how much they reconfigure it per-production. The traverse staging is super intimate and especially creates a cozy atmosphere around the dinner table scenes. The lighting is nice, too; beyond the spotlights, there’s some lovely colored lighting to enhance the emotionality of some scenes, and one scene in particular is staged “outside” with nothing but a pretty filter over the lights. Dug that.

I dunno! This show is in a weird place. It feels like it’s very close to being very good, but I didn’t leave with a particularly strong impression. I might have given it anywhere between two and five stars depending on when you asked me, and any of those ratings feels like it would be an oversimplification. On behalf of me, Jane Austen, and attention spans everywhere, thanks for reading the long form version instead.