JANE AUSTEN IN 89 MINUTES


Jane Austen fans are guaranteed to go gaga for Jane Austen In 89 Minutes, Syrie James’s deliciously clever retelling of every single novel Jane ever published, now getting a scintillatingly performed World Premiere production at Theatre 40.

It’s none other than Miss Austen herself (Katyana Rocker-Cook) who serves as our guide to her oeuvre, informing us at lights up that we are about to see “all six of my novels, contracted to their essence, presented in the order in which they were published.”

 First up, therefore, is Sense and Sensibility, and with just fifteen minutes to compact an entire novel, the same one it took the BBC three hours to tell back in 2008, it’s up to Mrs. Dashwood to start things off lickety-split by complaining to us how unfair it is that “I, Mrs. Dashwood, and my daughters Elinor, Marianne, and Margaret, have been cast out of our home, Norland Park, by my departed husband’s son by his first wife, with barely a penny to our names,” and if, as Jane puts it, “that is a great deal of back story to cram into one sentence, … this is the speed version so we must make do.”

Over the course of the remaining 85 or so minutes, audiences get treated not just to Sense and Sensibility trimmed down to basics but uber-abridged versions of Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion as well. (There’s even a mention of Austen’s unfinished Sanditon, recently “completed” by British TV and shown here in the U.S. on PBS’s Masterpiece.)

And since Jane Austen In 89 Minutes takes not only the novels as its source material but also their most famous big-and-small-screen adaptations, we get lines like “Edward Ferrars is not at all handsome, except in the film versions!” and several visits by a couple of contemporary American Austen fans debating who was the definitive Darcy, Colin Firth in 1997 or Matthew Macfadyen in 2005, and don’t get them started on “the 1940 Laurence Olivier version, with those costumes that look like they came straight off the set of Gone With the Wind!”

And speaking of Firth’s Mr. Darcy, it wouldn’t be an Austen-on -film tribute without a replication of the iconic moment the English film star emerged from a lake, his sopping wet silk shirt rendered nearly transparent on an oh so manly chest, to which Jane quips, “It’s an invention from the 1995 BBC mini-series! But … I admit, it was pretty hot.”

Admittedly not every detail can make it into Jane Austen In 89 Minutes given that with only six actors playing a grand total of fifty-two roles, “We don’t have enough actors to play everybody,” but no matter.

Along the way, there are parties galore (“A ball! A ball!”) and a desk bell gets rung every time a character says all or part of a novel’s title, that is until we arrive at Emma and it gets a bit ridiculous how many times that bell gets rung.

All of this adds up to 89 minutes of both Austen and adapter James at their cleverest, director James eliciting one delicious performance after another from a couldn’t-be-better cast (Todd Andrew Ball, Alison Blanchard, Megan Deford, Steven G. Frankenfield, Michael Mullen, Rocker-Jones, and Holly Sidell), each of whom I’d gladly devote a paragraph of superlatives to if space permitted.

Suffice it to say that every one of Jane Austen’s iconic characters is in the most expert of hands.

Jane Austen In 89 Minutes looks terrific too with the cast costumed to Recency perfection by the playwright-director and performed on an elegant set that looks to have been recycled from an uncredited Jeff G. Rack’s design for The Explorers Club. Sound and lighting designs, also uncredited, are both topnotch.

Jane Austen in 89 minutes is produced by David Hunt Stafford. Shayna Gabrielle alternates with Deford as Lady #2. Philip Sokoloff is publicist.

Though to my embarrassment I have never actually read Jane Austen, I’ve seen so many stage and screen adaptations of her novels I’ve lost count by now.

No wonder therefore that it took me only seconds to fall head over heels for Jane Austen In 89 Minutes.

Theatre 40, 241 S. Moreno Dr., Beverly Hills.
www.Theatre40.org

–Steven Stanley
September 29, 2024
Photos: Syrie James

 

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