Tag Archives: Lauren Gunderson

Christmas at Pemberley Gets a Gendered Makeover

Review: Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley @ the Cain Center

By Perry Tannenbaum

If it weren’t for all the adaptations we hear about on TV and in movies, we could say that it required supreme audacity for Lauren Gunderson and , to tread in Jane Austen’s footsteps and pen a sequel to Pride and Prejudice, her wittiest and most beloved novel. But despite the obvious commercial bent of Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley, Gunderson and Melcon have aimed to capture Austen’s essence and bring fresh life to her characters.

As you’ll find up at the Cain Center in Cornelius, no small thanks to the audacious direction of Steve Kaliski, the script sprinkles a bit of modern perspective on the Bennet sisters and their beaus – occasionally forcing us to recognize that Austen’s times are not so different from our own. Elizabeth Darcy, the heroine of the novel, still retains enough decorum not to call Fitzwilliam Darcy by his first name. Even in the privacy of their own home!

Likewise, elder sister Jane and her beloved Charles address each other as Mr. And Mrs. Bingley. “Happy Christmas” rather than “Merry Christmas” is the greeting norm, and the Christmas tree tradition has yet to take root in England in December of 1815. It’s Elizabeth’s audacity that brings this German custom to the Pemberley drawing room with its attached library.

In some ways, history has circled back. Back in college, my professor instantly drew our attention to the epistolary nature of Pride and Prejudice. The story is largely driven by letter writing. A chief turning point in the story is contained in a letter from Darcy addressed to Elizabeth, debunking her previous prejudices against him!

The prevalence of letter writing astonished us then – and felt alien. Ancient. Forty-plus years later, the sight of Mary Bennet, her sister Lydia, and Arthur de Bourgh exchanging billets-doux while under the same roof has to remind me of today’s texting, Instagramming youth, perpetually thumbing their cellphones. Buttressed by books, these youngsters can put quill to paper.

With Kitty off in London, not expected to arrive until Christmas Day with her parents, Mary is the only Miss Bennet we see and unexpectedly the leading lady. Arthur is an entirely new character, rivalling Mary in his bookishness. Resigned to spinsterhood, Mary is shocked to find that they’re hitting it off.

The forward-looking Gunderson and Melcon, proclaiming that Austen is for everyone, encourage diverse casting. But Kaliski and his Davidson Community Players go further, bringing us an all-female/non-binary cast. It’s an added semicircle backwards to Elizabethan days when only boys and men were permitted to perform onstage.

All three of these transpositions – Brooke McCarthy as Darcy, Rhianon Chandler as Bingley, and Jennifer Adams as De Bourgh – add a fresh patina of mirth and comedy. As for the playwrights, they inject plenty of wit and sparkle of their own. Speaking to Darcy before we see that Jane is seven-months pregnant, Elizabeth broadly hints she is arriving “safely and enormously.” Lizzy is more tactful when the expectant mother enters and they exchange greetings:

Lizzy: Look at you! You’re radiant.

Jane: I’m as large as a cottage.

Lizzy: And exactly as a cottage, you are warm, filled with life, and lit from within.

Although McCarthy plays him with some florid gestures, we soon see that he is richly endowed with breeding and tact. When the punctilious Mary presumes to correct Bingley, by informing him that the tree standing before them is a spruce and not a fir, Darcy pointedly intervenes. Before any dispute can begin, he proposes that he and his longtime chum exit for a brandy.

The ladies can now rebuke Mary, if they wish. They do, while gradually discovering that their younger sister has more charm and talent than previously suspected. Arthur’s admiration for her shocks them as much as it shocks Mary herself. As it turns out, Lizzy and Jane better be witty and perceptive, for Mary and Arthur are the plumiest roles. Fortunately, with the arrival of Lydia, the silly sister with the sham marriage, Lizzy and Jane can redirect their sharpest barbs.

Arthur is the heir to the nearby Rosings estate, but he is a distant nephew of the late Lady Catherine and has never lived there. There is some juicy history at that estate, left over from Pride and Prejudice,chiefly the presumption that Darcy would marry Milady’s daughter and not the comparatively lowborn Lizzy. Not to worry, Pemberley gracefully catches us up if we don’t remember Austen’s original.

What makes the role of Arthur so appealing is that he has no clue how to run an estate – and no solid experience with other men, women, or people. Adams carries a book around with her as if it were Arthur’s security blanket. Without one, Adams seems at a loss for what to do with her hands and arms, so we see Arthur almost perpetually in a scholarly or supplicating pose.

Attempting a billet-doux, Adams as Arthur reminded me of Christian in Cyrano de Bergerac, only he has nobody to help him out. When Arthur learns that his cousin Anne, after getting jilted by Darcy, now presumes she is betrothed to him, Adams’ awkwardness and shyness veer toward desperation and panic. When bliss is achieved, Adams’ glow is mesmerizing.

Crippled by a similar lack of self-esteem, Sahana Athreya as Mary is no more experienced and no less shy than Arthur – so she can range from being pedantic and irritating to heartbroken and pitiful to vivacious and adorable. Athreya can also freely gesticulate with her arms and sit down regally at the pianoforte.

The central triangle is further complicated by Destiney Wolfe as the compulsively silly Lydia. Glossing over her troubled marriage doesn’t inhibit Lydia from flirting shamelessly with Arthur, giving us extra tastes of how unaccustomed he is to such attentions. Nor does Kaliski bar Wolfe from being as irritating as Mary at her worst. On the contrary. Wolfe, when she isn’t pouncing, is often prancing.

At the center of all the overtures from Mary and Lydia – and the strict orders from Agatha Emma as the imperious Anne – Adams gets to be meaningful as well as stressed and sympathetic. For Mary and Lizzy, in the face of Arthur’s inclination to yield to Anne, are at considerable pains to remind him that he has what women don’t: a choice.

Of course, when Gunderson and Melcon wrote their merry comedy in 2016, they had no inking that “Your body, my choice” would be staging a comeback. But the playwrights are far from declaring that women were powerless. Even before her Christmas awakening, Mary is strong enough to proclaim that she would rather wed a plant than an unsuitable man.

Caring about their sisters, Lizzy and Jane sustain their relevance, Skylar Schock as Lizzy warming up to Mary and Emma Kitchin as the Jane becoming Lydia’s tactful benefactor. Christmas can even be celebrated by Emma, for it turns out that there’s kindness in Lydia beneath her silly, meddlesome surface.

Kaylen Gess’s scenic and lighting design complement each other handsomely, with Caleb Sigmon’s projections adding an extra festive luster. I’d imagine that Gunderson and Melcon would have envisioned a much larger, more intrusive tree at Pemberley. But as a Tannenbaum, I’m probably prejudiced.

The tree outside Cain Center, let me add, is big and bright enough for anyone.

Bound and Gagged in a Georgia Cabin

Review: Exit, Pursued by a Bear

By Perry Tannenbaum

It’s been 28 years since I saw a murderous woman binding a man to a chair onstage, and I haven’t forgotten the spectacle of that near rape-victim turning the tables – and a spool of duct tape – on her would-be rapist. Maybe there were other instances after that stunning UNC Charlotte production of Extremities in 1991, one of the top five dramas I critiqued that year. If so, those action she-roes haven’t seared themselves in my memory the way that William Mastrosimone’s did.

A trail of empty honey bottles greeted us outside the Warehouse Performing Arts Center storefront in Cornelius as we entered upon a similar scene in Exit, Pursued by a Bear, the new Charlotte’s Off-Broadway production directed by Anne Lambert. Once again, three people are deliberating what to do with the captive – Kyle Carter, who has abused his wife Nan for the umpteenth time. Lauren Gunderson’s 2012 play, subtitled “A Southern-Fried Revenge Comedy,” isn’t quite as intent on ratcheting up the tension.

Like Gunderson’s title, derived from Shakespeare, it’s complicated. Often cited as the Bard’s most outré – or hilarious – or expensive – stage direction, “Exit, pursued by a bear” occurs in Act 3, Scene 3, of The Winter’s Tale. The fleeing nobleman is the otherwise forgettable Antigonus, whose mauling is vividly reported a moment later by the curiously named Clown, a shepherd’s son, while the bear is still devouring its kill offstage.

Nan isn’t intending to give her husband even that sporting chance at survival. She plans to abandon her secluded cabin in the Georgia woods and leave the doors open for any bear in the vicinity to enter. To hurry the process, Nan and her friends Simon and Sweetheart are adding inducements to make Kyle more aromatic and inviting. Some honey, of course, but here’s some luck: Kyle just killed a deer, so they can cut up some fresh meat and strew that around, too. Cool condiments!

Since Conrad Harvey as Kyle is already bound and gagged as we walk by with our tickets and drinks – hey, go ahead and take selfies with Conrad if you like – Gunderson is taking on two conflicting objectives when the lights come up. She’s painstakingly justifying what Nan is doing to her husband, and she’s striving to preserve the murderous unraveling of the Carters’ marriage in a comedy mold. Nan’s accomplices come in handy for both of these objectives.

Sweetheart is a stripper at a local bar who aspires to be an actress – or at least a movie star – and Kyle is Nan’s lifelong best friend. Since he is a bit of a queen in his Georgia Bulldogs cheerleading outfit, the stripper-transvestite combo is inherently comical as soon as it forms, if you’re not going to be offended by stereotyped affronts to political correctness and feminism. Part of the action, you must remember, is Nan overcoming her submissiveness and moving towards feminism. It’s a liberating leap.

With Kyle as her literally captive audience, Nan will express the anger, frustration, and humiliation she has kept bottled up inside by playing out the key scenes that have pushed her to this drastic homicidal response. Since Kyle is indisposed – and hasn’t learned his lines – Julia Benfield as Sweetheart will step into the role of Nan’s husband in these flashbacks. Lambert has made a cagey casting choice here. Benfield is not only dwarfed by Harvey, you’ll see that Julie Janorschke Gawle towers over her as well. More built-in comedy.

Benfield is trashy in her cinched flannel shirt impersonating Kyle, and a fair amount of that trashiness appears to come naturally, but the more we get to know her, the more clearly we see that she isn’t a slut or a bimbo. With all the two-handed scenes in the flashbacks, you might worry that Simon is simply superfluous. But he’s more than a cheerleader. When Nan wavers, Simon is there to help shore up her resolve.

Not always the subtlest of performers, Ryan Stamey calibrates and balances his bloodthirsty zeal, his genuine affection for Nan, and his flaming outrageousness in such a precise way that he emerges as genuinely human rather than as a cartoon provocateur. With this kind of quirky support, Gawle can explore the serious depths that Gunderson explores in the Carters’ abusive marriage. Nan’s waverings are based in a pathological dependency that develops between an abused spouse and her abuser, ground into the rubble of crushed self-esteem.

Gunderson also wants us to be ambivalent about the payback Nan is meting out, no matter how many Hollywood revenge flicks we’ve seen. As if he were on trial rather than passively listening to his sentence, Kyle gets his chances to speak and defend himself. More than that, he gets Nan to allow him a temporary reprieve from his bondage, so that he can re-enact the good times they had together before things went sour.

Harvey doesn’t mitigate the fact that Kyle is a boorish hayseed, but he also doesn’t hold back on the sincerity of “getting it” and his intent to be a better man. We’re apt to be a little torn, as Nan is, on the option of giving Kyle a second chance. Gawle is visibly affected by Harvey’s pleas, his evocations of past Kyles, and perhaps his newfound respect for the doormat who has risen up against him. So with the prospect of Kyle suddenly reverting to violence, there’s not only dramatic tension in the air but also multiple layers of give-and-take between Nan and Kyle, Nan and Simon, between the men and inside Nan’s heart.

Feminists will appreciate how this deadlock is broken.

Gawle does everything right interacting with the other performers. She even gives herself moments when she ponders the enormity of what she’s planning – and to question whether she’s sufficiently calm to proceed after the suddenness and the adrenaline rush of what she has done and how it has changed her. One thing you might question is whether Gawle is as Southern or as trashy as Gunderson imagined her. Hang in there until Nan’s final scene, and you’ll likely see the rationale for the choice Gawle and Lambert have made in crafting her character.

Along with the cast’s work onstage, costume design by Ramsey Lyric, lighting by Sean Kimbro, and Jarvis Garvin’s fight choreography are all indicative of Charlotte Broadway’s professionalism. The only dodgy aspect of this production are the projections flashed on the upstage wall delivering stage directions when we reach Gunderson’s play-within-a-play segments. The lettering doesn’t exactly pop, and efforts to read them can draw attention away from the action. Maybe freezing the action might help solve the problem. Worth a try.

Otherwise, Exit, Pursued by a Bear is all-pro all the way. Consider yourself lucky if you can pursue and snag a ticket.

Gunderson’s “Revolutionists” Reminds Us That 1793 Wasn’t a Very Good Year

Review : The Revolutionists

By Perry Tannenbaum

It’s easier to enjoy Lauren Gunderson’s The Revolutionists, a finely polished comedy gem from PaperHouse Theatre, than it is to find it. My GPS app resisted the 1776 Statesville Avenue address that was on my smartphone calendar, forcing me to choose between a Camp North End and a Goodyear Arts destination nearly 100 address numbers apart. Choosing the 1824 Statesville address got me to the Camp North End gate well enough after dark, and there was a PaperHouse emissary at the gate to tell us how to proceed. But as we navigated through a desolate concrete-and-asphalt landscape of vast warehouses, it was definitely an uh-oh episode for Milady GPS, who spun around from “Recalculating” to “Turn Right” in her instructions like a dog chasing its tail.

Following traffic wasn’t a reliable remedy, and I apologize to anyone who followed our lead on opening night and wound up parking a wilderness away from the PaperHouse performing space. Within sight of what looked like the building entrance – and another PaperHouse emissary – I still probably walked nearly a quarter of a mile after thinking I had sufficiently improved my parking spot. You walk through that building to another one.

Fortunately, PaperHouse is much better at producing plays than at getting you to them. (They will deploy more guides for future performances, I was assured.) Once you do arrive a the site of the action, with scenery by Jordan Ellis that strikes us as much with its simulated blood-spattered walls upstage as it does with the ascending scaffold in front of them, you can start to believe you’ve really reached the French Revolution during the Reign of Terror. You’re a bit of a pioneering revolutionary yourself if you’ve persevered and reached this secluded spot.

In the meta-world of her own – and history’s – making, The Revolutionists is Gunderson’s play, and it isn’t. We seem to be watching French feminist playwright Olympe de Gouges battling an onset of writer’s block as she ponders her next response to the rampaging Reign of Terror in the seclusion of her study. She is much in demand, for while Olympe is thrashing around, trying to settle on her message and her medium – shall it be another play? or perhaps a pamphlet? or a manifesto? – in walks Charlotte Corday, pressing the writer to compose a memorable line she can declaim when she assassinates the rabid revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat in his bathtub.

Olympe isn’t in advertising, so one-liners and slogans aren’t her forte. She hopes to come up with the right zinger during the course of composing a longer work, a plan that doesn’t jibe well with Charlotte’s mad impatience. Just when you think that the comedy will crest with the standoff between Charlotte’s insane homicidal urgency and Olympe’s many artistic hesitancies, in walks Marie Antoinette, dressed to the 17’s by costume designer Barbi Van Schaick. Her Highness wants a rewrite, a play by Olympe that will rebrand her tarnished reputation.

Everything seems to become absurd and almost surreal at this point – and likely stays that way with Marie’s queenly vanities and Olympe’s nervous vacillations. But if you go home and Google, you find that Olympe de Gouges really did embark on writing a play to rehab Marie Antoinette’s reputation, and that the playwright really did put herself in that work as an enlightened agent who reconciles the queen with the revolutionaries. If that weren’t enough, it’s also true that de Gouges wrote the courageously feminist Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, thereby punching her ticket to the guillotine.

In the play, Olympe writes her manifesto in response to some principled prodding from Marianne Angelle, a Haitian revolutionary seeking independence from France, the one fictitious character in Gunderson’s script. In the real world, de Gouges seems to have had no problem standing up for herself – and against the Revolution’s bloodthirsty zealots.

So you might take the layered-on comedy a couple of ways. Gunderson may be telling us that she prefers her feminist heroes to be more fallible and true-to-life rather than impossibly glorified. Or she might be substituting herself for Olympe and showing us how far short of the French revolutionary’s greatness she falls.

Gunderson nudges us to that second, self-effacing hypothesis with little anachronisms that she occasionally drops into the dialogue, like Marie’s rebranding and rewrite ideas. PaperHouse artistic director Nicia Carla takes the anachronisms beyond what Gunderson specifies in her stage directions, and she doesn’t waste any time about it. Lydia Williamson makes her first entrance as Marianne carrying a garish, polka-dotted plastic suitcase, and when Shawna Pledger as Olympe begins writing at her escritoire, she quickly switches from a quill to a BIC ballpoint.

So Pledger is only superficially presiding over a play that Olympe has written for her queen with a plum role for herself. She is actually channeling Gunderson writing a dark comedy about herself, and if you saw Pledger last season as the fretful Sister Shelley who runs the soup kitchen in Grand Concourse, you already know that she excels at stressed-out indecisive women who are so eager to please. Surrounded by this madhouse, Williamson as Marianne doesn’t get as many comedy opportunities as the true historical figures, but she does loosen up from time to time, on temporary leave from her hectoring. Cumulatively, she leaves us with the impression that the French, whatever their politics, have no special call for commanding an empire.

Au contraire.

Sarah Woldum has now haunted PaperHouse productions for two consecutive Octobers, last year as Sheridan LeFanu’s vampire Carmilla and this year as the notorious Corday. This time, she can milk a laugh or two from the assassin’s irrational zeal and her PR impulses, but she’s unmistakably insane. I’m not sure she ever blinked.

As for Caroline Bower, she does enter as an overdressed Barbi doll with some truly vain, insensitive, and bubbleheaded lines to delight us with. But Marie Antoinette’s grand gown, the ribbons she loves so frivolously, and the ridiculous piled-high wig and feathers all do come off as the Reign of Terror sweeps its scythe through our women, and its Bower’s humbling – still cohering with the incredibly spoiled brat we first saw – that brings home how monstrous the French Revolution turned out to be.

In the end, we might realize that our man’s world of today is hardly less bloody than it was in the fatal year of 1793 – and that Gunderson isn’t entirely playful or self-critical when hinting that she trembles in the face of such brutality.