Review: PRIDE & PREJUDICE at Portland Center Stage

Pride and Prejudice is serious business in my house. The definitive 1995 A&E miniseries is a frequent rewatch, and we recently spent many pleasant evenings listening to Dame Julie Andrews read the book aloud on her podcast, Jane Austen Stories. So, I was excited to see Kate Hamill’s adaptation of Austen’s novel of manners, which opens Portland Center Stage’s 2026-2027 season under Marissa Wolf’s direction. I thought Hamill did a great job with Sense & Sensibility, and I am always game for an updated version, a new lens, a different understanding of a well-known story. But this production pulls the original so far apart that there really isn’t anything left of it.

Jane Austen’s 1813 novel is a scathing social satire of 19th-century English life and the pressures facing women in it, particularly as it comes to marriage. The Bennets have five daughters (four in the play) and no son, so when Mr. Bennet (played by Michael O’Connell) dies, the home will go to a distant cousin, the pompous Mr Collins (Janice Munk). The family’s future depends on the daughters marrying well. Its brilliance comes from subtlety, nuance, and Austen’s ability to deliver a razor-sharp takedown in the sweetest possible voice. It is already very funny.

This version is a fast-paced farce, setting subtlety and nuance aside in favor of slapstick comedy and lewd humor. The characters are reshaped to match, to the extent that they hardly resemble their original selves. All of the female characters become silly girls, even Lizzy (Kushi Beauchamp). Even Charlotte Lucas (Michael O’Connell), who in the book is the exact opposite of silly. Others are drawn as cartoons: Mary (Treasure Lunan) brings a horror-comedy vibe, Mr. Bingley (also Treasure Lunan) becomes a puppy chasing a ball, and both Lydia (Nicole Marie Green) and Miss De Bourgh (Ashlee Radney) are infantilized. With all this going on, Mr. Darcy (Setareki) hardly factors in. Somewhere along the way, the plot loses its footing.

Farce works brilliantly when it’s taken seriously, as last season’s fabulous production of The Play That Goes Wrong showed. The stakes have to be high, and, as John Cleese says “absurd situations have to be believable [and] the actors have to find a way of making very eccentric behavior credible.”

That believability never quite arrives here. It’s hard to imagine anyone behaving this way, in the 1800s or now. There’s a moment when Mrs. Bennet (Dana Green) admonishes her family (and by extension the audience) for not taking the situation seriously: don’t they understand that they’re going to lose their home? But no one onstage seems to be taking it seriously, so it’s hard for the audience to do so. 

This despite the fact that the cast is full of excellent actors, several of whom are well-suited to the characters Austen created. I’d love to see a different version with Kushi Beauchamp as Lizzy, Dana Green as Mrs. Bennet, Michael O’Connell as Mr. Bennet (though not Charlotte Lucas), Ashlee Radney as Jane, Treasure Lunan as Mr. Bingley, and Janice Munk as Miss Bingley.

I’d also keep the scenic design. Alex Meyer’s set is gorgeous. Bright, colorful, and richly lit by lighting designer Joel Ferraro, it transforms in seemingly simple but lovely ways to accommodate the various settings.

Of course, I’m just one viewer. Plenty of people in the audience laughed every time Mary did the equivalent of creeping up behind someone and saying “boo,” at the sexual innuendo, and at how silly Michael O’Connell looks as Charlotte Lucas. I’m not against any of these things. But as used here, they just didn’t land for me.

PRIDE & PREJUDICE runs through October 25. Details and tickets here.

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