Bedlam is presenting Jane Austen’s final novel, Persuasion—directed by company helmer Eric Tucker and adapted by Sarah Rose Kearns—as a production for our times. This may sound like good news. It isn’t. To use a word Austen frequently turns to, it’s vexing.
In endlessly different manners and mores, 2021 America couldn’t be more unlike Austen’s early 1800s. The year after the prolific author’s 1817 demise, readers received their first look at a novel which follows the not-as-plain-as-she-thinks Anne Elliot. At 19, she’s in love with then unpromising naval officer Captain Wentworth. Unfortunately, older and imperious Lady Russell persuades her that such a union is premature, if not unwise at any time.
Anne is required to repress her longing—both Repression and Longing would have been apt titles for the novel—while Captain Wentworth, rising smartly in the ranks, takes Anne’s rejections to heart. Like the object of his affection, he must gallantly repress his longing. As a result, they regard each other accordingly, all the while others surrounding them all but make a practice of interrupting their many potential reconciliations. (Interruption would have been another apt title for the novel.)
The momentous literary point is that Persuasion chronicles an era when the English upper classes, traveling by coach or steed between Bath and Lyme, kept their emotions to themselves, not their opinions necessarily but their deepest feelings. That was the essence of politesse. Raised voices, no matter what the circumstances, were not in vogue. As Austen reported it, if one felt the need to raise his or her voice, it was by no more than two or three decibels, followed shortly by apologies and contrition.
Not so with the stage transfer. Neither director Tucker nor adapter Kearns (her bio mentions she’s a “lifelong Austen enthusiast”) give Persuasion such a reading. A concerned viewer suspects that when they set about dramatizing brilliantly sly observer Austen, they might have had more prominently in mind the rural shenanigans covered by Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, 1749 pub date.
Rather than setting socially proper persons—no matter how improper under their delicate skins—between the proscenium, Tucker and Kearns have unleashed a gaggle of rowdies. They scream and yell as if that’s the only way to outdo the shouting and blaring coming at them.
Aside from Anne (Arielle Yoder), Lady Russell (Annabel Capper), and Captain Wentworth (Rajesh Bose), who are all perfectly fine, the rest of the often-doubling cast members are asked—no, incessantly prodded—not to sit as members of the gentry who when occupying a chair would never let themselves lean against its back. Instead, these reprobates think nothing of flopping on the floor. Indeed, there’s a whole lot of flopping going on, not to say a whole lot of indecently groping sometimes by all 10 (or close to it) participating cast members.
The wholesale misunderstanding of Austen’s intentions in perhaps her most mature work—her subtle reflections on the surface and depth on her characters—takes an expensive toll on Persuasion. The worst of it being the effect it has of shunting Anne to the sidelines. What spectators get to know about her is no more than her lengthening unrequited love for Captain Wentworth and her equally lengthy love of poetry. Otherwise as watched on the busy-busy stage, she could just as easily be a well-behaved young woman not entirely involved with the circus she’s unwarily attended.
Captain Wentworth is just about equally overshadowed. A Tucker-Kearns advocate could say that the skullduggery getting in the way of Anne and Wentworth does represent proliferating events that keep them from one another. But no, not to the extent of altogether obscuring them.
As for the look of this Persuasion, it’s certainly not essential that it be outfitted with Regency finery. A director asking a set designer for an otherwise pleasantly esthetic look is perfectly fair. John McDermott’s set, however, looks as if it contains found objects turned up after a fast scan of nearby streets. The most prominent piece is a perhaps 10’x8’ wooden frame. Pulled from the wings during the first of the two acts, it’s hung with a view of meadows and hills. During the second act, a full-length portrait of a nearly naked figure hangs on it askew.
There is one charming set-piece: a small white wooden window frame, held up by one cast member for a short time so that another cast member may peer through it for a quick scan of the land. Another effective moment has Tucker grouping several cast members around Anne so that Les Dickert can conjure a lighting effect that Georges de la Tour would salute. Also, choreographer Susannah Millonzi gives the cast a pert finale.
This Persuasion does abound with music for our time—and of our time. Often played by Yonatan Gebeyehu (appearing as Mr. Shepard) at a constantly shifted piano, the score includes “Happy Birthday,” written in 1934. Enough of recognizable contemporary songs are heard that at one interlude when a character says of a scheming, whispering Anne competitor “I Love Louisa,” it was all but a shock that the Arthur Schwartz-Howard Dietz “I Love Louisa” from The Bandwagon didn’t float into the auditorium.
After Sense and Sensibility, also Austen, the possibly best example of Bedlam’s work to date, Persuasion stands as a clumsy descent from a notable peak. It’s as if Tucker not only wants to present a Bedlam production but is making an effort to substantiate the company name.
Persuasion opened September 28, 2021, at the Connelly Theater and runs through October 31. Tickets and information: bedlam.org
