The answer to the question posed by the title of Emily Breeze’s Are the Bennet Girls Ok? is: No, the Bennet girls Jane, Elizabeth, Mary, Kitty, and Lydia are not ok. They’re suffering from an affliction serious enough for them—and the play in which they’re currently appearing—to be quarantined.
This dire diagnosis is, as readers will understand, the response to a dizzying theatrical spin on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. The new work might be considered beneath serious review but nonetheless requires for-the-record coverage.
Although Breeze keeps the action in Austen’s early 19th-century period, she brings the tone up to date. Not, however, breezily, as her surname suggests. She goes about her sophomoric—no, grade-school—exercise in several ways.
Not the least of the transgressions has Lizzie (never Elizabeth) and Jane (too one-syllabic to shorten) drop obscenities into their outbursts like detonating punctuation marks. For one groan-inducing example, Austen’s refined Jane gets to declare, “Oh, my f***ing god.” Into the bargain she also blasphemes. The f-bomb-spewing Lizzie indulges the occasional “like” in her discourse.
Breeze has the good grace to stick to the storyline but not so closely she doesn’t keep from altering it for her purposes, whatever those purposes may be. Among the revisals are giving pride of place to Cousin Collins and conniving Wickham. (All male characters are played by one actor quick-changing frock coats. Mariah Anzaldo Hale is the clever costume designer).
The frequently present Collins and Wickham contrast with the off-handed treatment accorded Darcy. His role is hardly more than a walk-on. Worse. Whenever he appears with Lizzie, he’s decidedly not a dashing figure. Uh-uh, he’s meek as a church mouse, all but kissing the hem of the interminably caustic Lizzie’s garment. His nearly sniveling manner reduces Breeze’s Austen-undoing to something that could have been called Snark and Self-Effacement.
In Austen’s Chapter 34, when Darcy proposes to Lizzie in a back-handed way and she rejects him curtly, there’s material Breeze could perhaps have made into a comically dramatic exchange. Not to be. Her imagination stretches to a short sentence with a scene-ending “no.” In other annoying adjustments, Mrs. Bennet is a drunk collapsing at the dinner table, and a dying Mr. Bennet is seen only briefly in a non-speaking appearance.
Bedlam artistic director Eric Tucker is, as he usually is, the director here. He is the one primarily responsible for a production where the tag “travesty” only begins to serve. The actors seem to be giving full commitment to their assignments, so much so that their names won’t be listed, sparing them further embarrassment. (Lighting designers Eric Southern and Cheyenne Sykes, though, do a fine job at their assignment.)
Putting forth low-bar work is bad enough, but low-bar trashing of a classic is more distressing. Here, of course, it’s presumably being displayed before audiences made up in large part of Austen lovers, fans of her most revered novel. For them Are the Bennet Girls Ok? is an affront.
Nevertheless, there may be an audience that would welcome Breeze’s contribution. Somewhere, somehow there may be readers who don’t especially care for Pride and Prejudice, readers happy to see it mocked. They must exist, mustn’t they? No? Unimaginable?
Oh well, the good news is that Pride and Prejudice will continue to sell for centuries to come (30 million or so copies to date), whereas Are the Bennet Girls Ok? could be forgotten in a matter of months, if not weeks or days.
Are the Bennet Girls Ok? opened October 5, 2025, at the West End Theater and runs through November 30. Tickets and information: bedlam.org
