Theater review: ‘Pride and Prejudice’ moves from parodic to romantic at Hartford Stage

It’s Hartford Stage’s turn to stage Kate Hamill’s very popular adaptation of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” and this may be the most ostentatious one yet. The show, directed by Tatyana-Marie Carlo, runs through Nov. 5, and it’s wacky and whimsical.

Hamill’s version is definitely a comedy, but it is seldom played as brassily as this. Characters scream and wail and run crazily across the stage. Stereotypes are played to extremes. Funny accents abound. Ladies snap open their fans with a flapping noise as loud as if they were snapping a whip. Built into all productions of the play are the quick-change amusements of Hamill’s insistence that a cast of seven play 15 characters among them. Only three performers are spared the need to change costumes constantly: The ones playing the main characters Elizabeth “Lizzy” Bennet and Mr. Darcy, plus the meddling mother Mrs. Bennet.

Lizzy and Darcy’s slow-burning attraction to each other is what fuels the plot, but there are numerous subplots and other distractions (many put into motion by Mrs. Bennet), and director Carlo plays them up big.

Hartford Stage opens its 60th season with a multicultural ‘Pride and Prejudice’

The action is relentless. Scenes don’t end in blackouts. Characters wander a revolving stage or strike poses as modern dance mixes of chamber music play. These groovy transitions add a little length to this “Pride and Prejudice,” which clocks in at two hours and forty minutes with an intermission. It’s hard to sustain such a frantic pace for such a long time, so it’s appreciated when things slow down a bit in the second half when love matches are made and the plot needs to start feeling credible if the romantic ending is going to work. When its heroine Lizzy, near the end of the play, says “I meant to be serious now,” the chaos has been reined in enough that seriousness is conceivable.

When the tone changes, the play stops acting like a parody of Austen and becomes a thoughtful examination of tired social conventions. In the first act, we see silly courtships. In the second, we’re told that the very concept of that sort of courtship is silly.

This is the third production of Hamill’s “Pride and Prejudice” in Connecticut in the past four years, and they’ve been very different from each other. When New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre did it in December 2019, it was just as fast-paced and diversely cast and even more colorful and abstract than this one, exploring gender representation as well as cultural expectations. Playhouse on Park did a more traditional production in 2020, directed by Hamill’s husband Jason O’Connell (who had originated the role of Darcy in the script’s 2017 world premiere at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Company). That one was the most consistent and fluid in terms of style and pace. It also seemed likely truest to Hamill’s original vision of putting a modern filter on the customs of Austen’s time, from Lizzy’s expansive female empowerment dialogue to these courtly British country elites doing disco moves in a courtly dance.

The humor in Hamill’s script of “Pride and Prejudice” doesn’t come from anachronisms weird cultural juxtapositions and silly sight gags, though the pompous Darcy getting a cocktail spilled on his crotch is how the playwright cleverly chooses to heighten the brash back-and-forth banter that initially draws them together. It mainly comes from Hamill applying post-feminist theory to Austen’s British countryside romances.

The four Bennet sisters in the story exist so they can be married off and maintain the family’s fortune and social standing. The opening line of Austen’s book is “It is a truth universally acknowledge that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” It is taken as gospel that some personality traits are more wedding-friendly than others. Subservience is considered a plus while independence is not. Hamill’s angle is to build up the outspoken spirit of Lizzy Bennet, the one person in this particular well-heeled, tradition-bound community who won’t acknowledge this alleged universal truth. At Hartford Stage, Lizzy is played evenhandedly by Renata Eastwick in a way that lets her debate animatedly with Darcy and others without her becoming a pariah for her non-mainstream beliefs about womanhood.

The cast is headed by Eastlick and Carman Lacivita as Darcy, but they do not set the style or tone of this production. They are the ones who get to have the least fun onstage, having to maintain straight-faced “Am I in love or not?” demeanors and handle the other characters’ extreme behaviors. This ranges from the hardened views and weary attitude of the sisters’ dad Mr. Bennet (Anne Scurria, who also plays the hopeful bride Charlotte Lucas) to the unhinged frenzy of Mary Bennet (given a pained-faced Goth ghoulishness by Madeleine Barker, who also plays Miss Bingley). María Gabriela González plays Jane, the most sensible sister besides Lizzy (and the most underwritten sister in this play), but gets to be wilder and weirder as the socially awkward Anne de Bourgh who has presumed since childhood that she would be married to Darcy.

Anne’s uptight mom Lady Catherine is played by Zoë Kim, whose bigger role is as the youngest Bennet, Lydia, whose misadventure with a suitor is the event that shifts the second act from the family’s earlier craziness to anxiety and concern. Lana Young has just one character to concentrate on, Mrs. Bennet. In both its chaotic and controlled periods, the show often gravitates around her stuffy yet fresh portrayal of an imperious yet emotional mother. Lacivita and Young were both in Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale” at Hartford Stage last season, which also had actors anchored by a centralized circular set design, and which also could shift from sadness to hilarity in a blink but definitely landed on the bleak edge of the light/dark equation.

The gimmick of actors taking multiple roles is integral to Hamill’s adaptation since it enhances the insular, clustered culture she’s depicting. All three male suitors in the show (besides Darcy) are played by Sergio Mauritz Ang, who chooses not to differentiate between two of them very much and goes over the top with the other one. The actor is recognizable in all his roles, which is funnier and more entertaining than the ambitious transformations some of the others make, where they’re so distinct they don’t get a comic bonus out of the changeover.

Some lovers of Austen’s original novel won’t know what to make of the crazed comic spirit of this production, but considering how many deviations “Pride and Prejudice” have endured, from teen romcoms to zombies, they’ll get over it. Just when you think it’s too far gone to get back on a dramatic track, the order is restored and Lizzy and Darcy’s love endures.

“Pride and Prejudice,” adapted from the Jane Austen novel by Kate Hamill and directed by Tatyana-Marie Carlo, runs through Nov. 5 at Hartford Stage, 50 Church St., Hartford. Performances are Tuesdays through Thursdays at 7:30 p.m., Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. There is a 2 p.m. matinee instead of an evening performance on Nov. 1. hartfordstage.org/pride-and-prejudice.