Long Wharf Stages A ​“Pride” To Be Proud Of

There is a point, at one of the dramatic peaks in the story of Pride and Prejudice, when Lizzy Bennet (Aneisa J. Hicks) is staring down the man who is either her nemesis or partner for life, Mr. Darcy (Biko Eisen-Martin). The sparring they’ve been doing has gotten about as intense as it can. The verbal gloves are coming off, and the illusions are all being stripped away. It’s then that Hicks’s take on the iconic character comes into full bloom. She’s one of the most famous characters in literature. But on the Long Wharf stage, she’s also a thoroughly contemporary black woman — and even more broadly, a person of our time. She’s fiercely intelligent, craving total honesty, and also a little frightened of what might happen if she actually gets it.

Kate Hamill’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice — now playing at Long Wharf through Dec. 22 — has been billed as a radical reworking of the original novel. People expecting a thorough departure from Austen, then, may be surprised at how faithful it actually is.

It still tells the story of the Bennets, a once well-to-do family now down on their luck. The way out of their financial predicament, especially as Mrs. Bennet (Maria Elena Ramirez) sees it, is for each of the four daughters (it’s five in the novel) — Lizzy, Jane (Octavia Chavez-Richmond), Mary (Luis Moreno), and Lydia (Dawn Elizabeth Clements) — to marry. This requires them to play the social game, to court suitors without seeming desperate, to win husbands without it seeming simply like manipulation. Complicating this still further is the fact that Lizzy Bennet and her father Mr. Bennet (Rami Margron) think the whole game is annoying nonsense. Lizzy despises the game, despises those who play it baldly, and yet still must find a husband. The intrigue rises when she crosses paths with Mr. Darcy, a very well-to-do single man who seems to like the game even less than she does. As friends and possible suitors align and the drama increases, Lizzy and Mr. Darcy clash. But is it also that sparks are flying? And will each of them ever be able to let down their defenses and see each other for who they truly are?

Anyone who has read the book or watched other adaptations knows the answer already. The fun lies in how the story unfolds. Part of Hamill’s trick in condensing the novel into a two-act play is to retain a great deal of Austen’s original language, which also lets her keep Austen’s masterful character development. Pride and Prejudice is firmly in the English literature canon in part because Lizzy is one of the most fully realized characters around, and she is as vivid on the stage as she is on the page. The same goes for the complex Mr. Darcy, the honest, straightforward Jane, and the sarcastic Mr. Bennet, along with a host of secondary characters.

The other part of Hamill’s trick, though, is to pare other things down to the bone. She cuts much of the melodrama in favor of the humor, for instance, which has the effect of speeding up the story and making the play feel much more like a comedy, which is not at all a bad thing. Much of the other elements cut, however, are the details of Austen’s original 19th-century upper-middle-class British setting. This has the effect of pulling the story out of its period and opening the door to a more modern interpretation that doesn’t have to call a lot of attention to itself to feel pretty current.

Under the direction of Jess McLeod, Long Wharf’s production continues steadily in that direction. The stage makes nods to 19th-century England in the shape of the furniture and some of the set patterns, but the color palette is blazingly modern. Similarly, the cast (all people of color), refreshingly, makes no attempt to put on British accents. They make the characters their own. Minute for minute, these deft modernizations make Pride and Prejudice a lot of fun to watch. The jokes come fast and furious, with the actors uniformly keeping them moving at a brisk clip. There are some clever gender reversals as actors play double and triple roles. Luis Moreno gets to play a somewhat grotesque Mary while embodying goofy Mr. Bingley as well. Brian Lee Huyhn perhaps has the most fun getting to play both duplicitous suitor Mr. Wickham and disastrously icky suitor Mr. Collins. Dawn Elizabeth Clements gets to completely switch personalities from insouciant teenager Lydia Bennet to imperious grand dame Lady Catherine de Burgh. Rami Margron shape shifts as Mr. Bennet (who gets a lot of the laughs) and Lizzy’s friend Charlotte — besides Jane, the two people Lizzy is closest to in the world. Maria Elena Ramirez, digs into the role of Mrs. Bennet — who in other adaptations too often comes across as flighty to the point of childish — and finds the woman who feels like she’s running out of time to do the best she can for her family.

Meanwhile, Hicks, Eisen-Martin, and Chavez-Richmond make the bold move of playing Lizzy, Mr. Darcy, and Jane as … simply real people. Earlier in the play, this serves the comedy. The jokes are sharper and fly a little faster. Later in the play — when the machinations and the subterfuge begin to erode away, and the barriers fall and the characters begin to speak more honestly with each other — it makes the characters more vulnerable. Lizzy and Mr. Darcy both have a long way to travel emotionally. In the book, it takes months. The play has to do it in two hours. Hicks’s and Eisen-Martin’s natural performances make their characters’ transformations not only believable, but affecting.

Setting Austen to more modern rhythms also raises some uncomfortable questions. It’s all too easy to us to take the Bennets’ problem as a 19th-century upper-middle-class one. Surely in the 21st century, Lizzy, Jane and Mary wouldn’t be looking for husbands to support them. They could just get jobs. Surely Lizzy wouldn’t have to put up with so much nonsense, and play so many social games that she despises.

But is that really true? We like to say we marry just for love now, but it’s naive to say that money — the need for security, the resentment and anger stirred by inequality — doesn’t play a role. Like the O’Jays told us about money in the 1970s, people still do good things and bad things with it, and for it. And sexism is alive and well, perhaps more pernicious in some ways than it was then because we want to believe that we’ve progressed. But how far have we really come? That Pride and Prejudice can still resonate tells us as much about that as it does about the enduring power of Austen’s navigation of the human heart.

Pride and Prejudice runs at Long Wharf Theatre, 222 Sargent Dr., through Dec. 22. Visit the theater’s website for tickets and more information.