Return to Pemberley is a holiday pleasure
Playwriting team’s third riff on Austen gives less celebrated sisters the spotlight
An effective comic script can lay a feast for actors. It says, “Here are the goodies. Seize them. Gobble them.”
Its playwright — or playwrights, in the case of “Georgiana and Kitty: Christmas at Pemberley” — has a deep understanding of theater as alchemy, of the script as just one vital ingredient in a magic spell. The space between words can be just as important as, if not more important than, the words themselves. But it still takes great craft and talent and in- sight and lack of egotism to create those lacunae, each a miniature stage where high jinks ensue.
At its best, Lauren Gunderson and Margot Melcon’s world premiere, which opened Tuesday, Nov. 23, at Marin Theatre Company, is a field day for its nine-person cast. “Georgiana and Kitty” marks the third of the playwriting duo’s holiday-set “Pride and Prejudice” sequels, this one following Mr. Darcy’s shy but musically gifted younger sister, Georgiana (Lauren Spencer), and Lizzy Bennet’s peevish, weak-willed sister Kitty (Emilie Whelan).
You’ll find the latter’s traits in scant evidence in this sequel, though. An ongoing theme of the “Christmas at Pemberley” trilogy is how family boxes you in, how it decides who you are and never lets that definition change, even long after you’ve evolved. But now that the most celebrated Bennet sisters Lizzy (Laura Odeh) and Jane (Aidaa Peerzada) have been married off, the younger ones, including Kitty, finally have the space they need to blossom and find love, which is all but inevitable when two eminently eligible bachelors (Adam Magill and Zahan F. Mehta) descend upon the Darcy estate for the holiday.
As Kitty, always scheming for her
best friend Georgiana’s happiness and fulfillment, Whelan lets new ideas electrify her. When Kitty finds she has something wise to say, a single line becomes occasion for metamorphosis and her own tickled reaction to it. Whelan revels in and is thrilled by her scene partners, devouring the cues they throw her way, cavorting with them, sending something exquisite, yet unexpected, back. Her Kitty and Magill’s Thomas O’Brien, simpatico at first sight, could vamp on each other’s signals all night long.
The beating heart of the show is Spencer’s Georgiana, who seeks not only the right to love but also the right to be an artist. As Georgiana comes into her own, despite what her
overprotective elder brother (Daniel Duque-Estrada) might wish, the insightful Spencer finds continuity between different life phases. There’s the diffident young girl who would rather burrow into herself or into the ground than hold the floor in a group, then the outspoken young woman who blazes trails for female musicians. For both, there isn’t just love of music but also thorough introspection about who she is and earnest interrogating of who she ought to be in relation to the world.
The show is perhaps overly fond of holiday treacle and easy girl-power sentiment, and some of its plot mechanics baffle, especially as time fast-forwards 20 years between acts. (Wouldn’t two people who love each other so deeply and whose best friends are a married couple have encountered each other once or twice in two decades?)
But such quibbles can’t nettle long next to Nina Ball’s lavish sets, where the built-in bookcases have their own pediments, and Fumiko Bielefeldt’s costume design. Jane Austen fans might be well-accustomed to the visual pleasures of tailcoats and empire-waist dresses, but when the show zips into the 1830s, the puffed sleeves are like weapons or the bulges of a bouffon clown or celestial bodies with their own center of gravity; little moon puffed sleeves could orbit around them.
And through it all is Meredith McDonough’s crackerjack direction. She can make an unspoken signal ripple through an ensemble and evolve as it moves. She can wield her uniformly strong cast as particles in a chemical reaction, surging and bouncing around till someone explodes.
In Gunderson and Melcon’s vision, Austen can still have all the wit that readers have cherished for 200 years, the sharp debates about love and morality and duty. But they needn’t be staid and starchy. The drawing room is a lab and a sports arena.