ARE THE BENNET SISTERS OK?

Review by Celia Ipiotis

The Bedlam Theater’s raucous production Are The Bennet Girls OK? based on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is wittily adapted by Emily Breeze and succinctly directed by Eric Tucker.

Know that it’s not about Darcy; it’s not about Wickham, or Bingley or Collins; it’s about Jane Austen’s women. In another imaginative twist on the classics, Bedlam’s production tackles truth as experienced by 19th century women living in Hertfordshire speaking to a 21st century audience.

Like a whirlwind in the center of her daughter’s daily dramas, Mrs. Bennet (Zuzanna Szadkowski)  –incapable of screening her thoughts — flings herself from happiness to despair through wild confessions and diamond strength truths. She blinds herself to her daughters’ overwrought emotions and yet, sees clearer than anyone else the fraught future afforded a family of all women.

Not unlike so many girls in their teens and early twenties, romance keeps floating just out of reach. When Jane’s (Shayvawn Webster ) love interest, the kind, gracious and very wealthy Mr. Bingley exits without comment, she remains poised in her wounded state. Lizzie (Elyse Steingold ), who’s constantly reading, bawdily comments on societal demands while easily propping herself up beyond the reach of admirers like the equally self-righteous Mr. Darcy.

Determined she will never marry, due to a dullness of looks and lack of fortune, Charlotte (Deychen Volino Gyetsa) accepts Lizzie’s invitation to stay for dinner when the clergyman and Bennet’s closest male relative, Mr. Collins joins the family ostensibly to propose. Well, propose he does to LIzzie who nonchalantly refuses the dolt. Then, unbeknownst to the family, he flings his invitation to Charlotte who accepts.

In one of the funniest turns, the forlorn Mary (Masha Breeze) sullenly plays the piano and harbors a true love for the sniggering Mr. Collins. Despite his rejection, Mary –moving like a ghost throughout the evening–just wants to be useful. Finally, the frivolous, self-absorbed youngest daughter Lydia entangles herself with the manipulative knave, Wickham.

And who might be playing the role of all the men? That would be the attractive  Edoardo Benzoni. He literally switches characters within the same scene simply by revising his physical carriage and altering his verbal tone. Tucker’s nonstop motion reveals all facets of the characters, their tumultuous lives lived large within an intimately circumscribed area.

This youthful interpretation does not flesh out the intricacies of Austen’s novel but it does delight in the interior lives of women so frequently overlooked then and now. 

EYE ON THE ARTS, NY — Celia Ipiotis