Review: Jane Austen's PERSUASION at Chesapeake Shakespeare

There is a great deal to like about the dramatization of Jane Austen’s novel Persuasion, just opened at the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company. There’s Kristina Lambdin’s stunning military dress uniforms and high-waisted Regency dresses. There’s old (or old-sounding) songs aplenty, including sea chanties, love songs, and a recreated operatic aria, presumably selected by music director Grace Srinivasan. There’s an imaginative set (e.g. a staircase that turns into a pianoforte), designed by Kathryn Kawecki. There’s a spirited, up-for-anything cast providing some outstanding performances. And Sarah Rose Kearns’ script introduces us to places the stage seldom depicts (rural Somersetshire, Lyme Regis, and Bath), at a period to which the stage seldom transports us (1806-1814). Nor will the audience be disappointed in its anticipation that, with source material by Austen, there are bound to be flashes of that author’s dry and sometimes sneaky sense of humor, not to mention the romantic conclusions that always cap off Austen’s plots.

So far, obviously, so good. But then there is a problem: Kearns’ script. It is not so much that Kearns lacks a playwright’s craft; it’s that Persuasion is, to its bones, a novel and not a play. As source material for a drama, it just doesn’t work all that well.

One problem is the sheer number of characters. One thing novels can do (and  Austen’s Persuasion does) is create fictional panoramas, vast landscapes full of people with complicated family trees and personal relationships, all of which can be characterized and explained by the author in whatever length of time it takes for the book to be read. Hemingway-esque concision is absolutely not required, and certainly not what Austen aspires to. By contrast, most theatrical audiences will lend an ear and an eye for only a couple of hours, not ideal for presenting, as here, a tale with twenty major characters, give or take, including five young women, four of them eligible for and by the end achieving matrimony, together with matching suitors, and in one case a “spare,” i.e. a suitor who will ultimately be disappointed. (There is also one disappointed female suitor for an older male character.)

And it does not help where, as here, there is much doubling and tripling of performers. Wait, one is apt to ask oneself, whom is she depicting right now? There is even a place where a performer makes a joke of the problem, looking offstage, professing to be observing another character we know to be portrayed (when onstage) by the same performer; he jests that he feels he’s seen that offstage character somewhere before. (It draws the expected laugh.) The doublings are confusing, and leave the characters portrayed in such a sketchy way that we don’t get to know them at all well. Of course, this is the Chesapeake Theatre Company, not a touring Broadway show at the Hippodrome, and there may well not be a budget for undoubled performers. But surely Kearns would have anticipated that – and she went ahead anyway. As a lawyer would say, she assumed the risk.

One can sympathize with her dilemma. When Kearns does cut a major character,  as in the the case of Austen’s Mrs. Smith, she leaves quite a gap. Mrs. Smith is vital to building Austen’s case against the disappointed suitor. Without Mrs. Smith’s testimony, Kearns is left with much less material to convince us of that suitor’s unsuitability. Kearns seems to see this and then to resort to overplaying other, slighter, unsatisfactory behavior on the suitor’s part, making his annoying persistence into something close to toxically abusive conduct. I’m not suggesting this is terrible playwriting and direction, but it is definitely a set of choices that takes us away from Austen’s conception of the story. So Kearns is damned if she does, damned if she doesn’t.

I’m also not saying that some other playwright could have done a better job turning this novel into a play; I just don’t think there can be a massively successful transition to the stage for this book, whatever the playwright’s strengths.

With that point noted, let me move on and praise the cast, as it deserves.

Of course, at the head of the line, we must consider the leads, Marissa Chaffee (pictured above) as Anne Elliot, the quietest but smartest of four sisters, and Joe Carlson as Captain Wentworth, the gallant and entrepreneurial naval officer whom we surely understand from the outset will eventually win her hand. Chaffee did what I’d consider a perfect job of putting Anne’s combination of empathy, reserve, talent for reading the room,  interest in poetry, and dutiful nature before us. In a sense, Carlson’s job is harder, because he must keep his character’s motivations and thoughts close to his vest until it is fairly late in what we eventually recognize as a courtship – in other words, simultaneously showing and not showing what the character thinks and feels. He acquits himself well in that paradoxical undertaking. And the moment when the two of them are finally united – well, you can see it coming a mile off, and it simply doesn’t matter; you’ll gasp.

I’d also like to mention Elana Michelle, a long-time CSC favorite, who draws either a short straw or a long one (you decide) by having to portray not two but three characters: one of Anne’s sisters, and a naval captain’s wife, and a naval captain – all with aplomb, and Molly Moores, tasked with giving us a delightful combination of characters, a highborn British grande dame with diction to match and a Cockney-inflected, kindhearted mariner’s wife. Less of a contrast, perhaps, is called for from Isaiah Mason Harvey, who gives us two different loudmouths: Charles Musgrove (the combative but also uxorious husband of another of Anne’s sisters) and the unsuccessful suitor I mentioned before. Sometimes loudmouths can be a good thing.  The rest of the cast are equally good.

It’s a little harder to know what to say about Megan Behm’s direction, as about most direction. Directors’ tasks are usually especially collaborative, and where a director’s accomplishment ends and someone else’s begins are hard to distinguish without having sat in on rehearsals, an opportunity the critic will seldom be given. That said, it is often possible to determine things a director should have prevented. And there was one of those things here.

I’m speaking of the rushed and unintelligible delivery of so many lines. As already noted, Austen paints on a vast canvas, and playwright Kearns is out to retail an expansive swath of it to the audience. That undertaking in turn requires conveying a veritable trove of information through dialogue. We probably don’t come to the theater with enough erudition about certain things like Britain’s Napoleonic-era navy and prize money, the laws of entail, or the complicated rules of rank in British society of that era, to understand fully what’s happening. We must rely on the help of tutorials buried in the lines to get what’s going on. And few of us (staunch Janeites possibly excepted) come to the show understanding as much as we would like about the family relationships of all the characters, for which the tutorials are also vital. But in this production those tutorials were among the heaviest casualties of the way the lines were often delivered. We had to penetrate the British accents, the fact of a thrust stage where no speech can be made facing every audience member, and most of all the speed with which many of the lines were recited.

This may be a residue of habits bred in staging Shakespeare, the more common pursuit at what is after all  a Shakespeare company. With Shakespeare, audiences are far more familiar with the lines they will hear, and for that matter familiar too with the historical contexts in which the characters speak. Failures of intelligibility for scattered words here and there will therefore damage overall audience comprehension less. I do applaud CSC’s broadening its repertoire over the last few years to bring in more non-Shakespearean but classical content like this, but intelligibility is something to be careful about as the company moves on.

At a superficial level, then, this production is like champagne: bubbly and fun. It will provide a good time. But Austen’s book was a far deeper and more interesting thing than this production adequately conveys.

Persuasion, by Sarah Rose Kearns, based on a novel by Jane Austen, directed by Megan Behm, through October 26 at Chesapeake Shakespeare Company, 7 South Calvert Street, Baltimore, MD 21202. Tickets $31-$69 at https://www.chesapeakeshakespeare.com/shows-tickets/persuasion/ or at 410-244-8570. Suitable for all ages.