Last Saturday was Mer’s day, and pretty mellow. I did start the day with a 16-mile run with my running partners Nate and Jason, but I was home and showered by 10:00, so it did not mess with Mer’s day too much. In fact, she got groceries, and I tried to nap, but was kept up by vocal kitties. That happens sometimes.
Mer did have plans for the evening, though. After supper, we headed down into the Valley, to Weathervane Community Theater, where we met up with our friends Dubbs and Nate (who ended up leaving at intermission because Dubbs was sick). The theater was putting on a youth production of Pride and Prejudice. The director introduced the play by indicating that the idea of youth theater was to give “actors under the age of 40 the chance to have a good role.” Most of the actors were college-aged. There were three adults – Mr. and Mrs. Bennet (the parents of the main character), and Lady Catherine, an older woman who holds her importance way too highly. Otherwise, all of the other roles were played by teenagers and actors in their early 20s.
The set was static (no rotating houses this time), but effective. The back of the stage was done up as the front of a nice two-story house, with an upper balcony. Characters could come out of the house onto the front of the stage, or could come out on the balcony. It worked just fine.
Pride and Prejudice was originally a novel, not a play, so this was an adaptation. In the book, one of the more interesting characters is the voice of the narrator, who is witty and even at times snide. This does not translate well to the stage (or the screen) without having a dedicated narrator, which is a bit odd to do on stage. To get around this, the playwright had the main characters give the narration during scene changes, and while still in character. It was not so good as the narrator in the book, but it worked pretty well.
A former CVCA student was on stage as Jane, the family beauty. It is much fun to see people you know on stage, and she did a very admirable job in playing Jane. The main character, Lizzy (or Elizabeth), is a long part, and the young actress did pretty well at it. It is a huge role, and she nailed all the lines (as far as I could tell), although I would have liked to see a broader range of emotions from her, especially when confronted by the love of Darcy, whom she abhors. My favorite character in this production was the selfish, dizzy, and man-crazy daughter, Lydia. The actress playing her was consistently vain and selfish, even while giving narration. I also liked the young man playing the dull preacher, Mr. Collins. He played Mr. Collins as very stiff and formal, with his voice cracking on stressed parts of the sentences. It worked well.
I was less happy with the portrayal of Mr. Bennet. In the book, it is key that he is a disappointed man in his marriage. He married young and for beauty, only to discover that he had married a woman for whom he had no respect. He badly wants to make sure his two oldest daughters (Jane and Lizzy) do not make the same mistake. I’m not sure if it was a director’s choice or not, but the Mr. Bennet of this play was played as an amused, almost happy-go-lucky man who seemed to genuinely like, if not love, his wife. It made the character of Mr. Bennet to be much more one-dimensional than he is portrayed in the book.
On the whole, though, I thought the play went very well. I only wish I had not been so sleepy – the 16-mile run on five-and-a-half hours of sleep made me a little less attentive than I normally am at plays.