Photo by Don Ipock

Take Jane Austen. Keep the characters (pretty much) and the social games. Triple the speed. Fillet the decorum. Add some crazy dancing. Oh, and hot pink lighting, a sugar-cube fight between the principals, and Mr Knightley’s strawberry waistcoat. In short, go all out and pollute the shades of Pemberley (or Highbury, in this case). Own it, revel in it. There you have the inimitable recipe for Kate Hamill’s extremely clever and funny transposition of Emma, presented by KC Rep at the Spencer Theatre, directed by Meredith McDonough and choreographed by Emily Michaels King. 

Emma is, as one critic has it, the perfectly calibrated novelist’s novel, and this is a playwright’s play. Hamill plays successfully with just about everything, the text (taking many liberties), the register (with Shakespeare, Austen, and contemporary American dialect all in evidence), the costumes (from Regency to contemporary florals to Frank Churchill’s leather and jeans), and most of all, with the boundaries between Emma and the audience. And why not? ‘It’s not in the novel’ Emma frankly acknowledges at times, and in the last act she harangues the audience for not informing her in advance of her errors. In the book she can only blame herself. In the play, she has us.

Jane Austen (1810 engraving)

Photo by Don Ipock

Plying other people with things and advice that they don’t want or need is clearly a father-and-daughter commonality, beautifully brought out here, in a way that is merely latent in the novel. Mr Woodhouse (Mark Robbins) plies everyone with gruel (pronouncing it with an aching disyllable)– almost causing the pregnant Miss Taylor to vomit and spooning into Harriet’s mouth to resolve an emotional crisis. Emma during her têtes-à-têtes plies Harriet with biscuits – Pavlovian rewards for taking advice and instruction. ‘Now you may have a biscuit’. She will refuse them to Knightley: he never takes her bidding. We know Harriet is no longer a pliable subject, when she finally tries to ply Emma with a biscuit. 

Photo by Don Ipock

I loved the tonal concision at key moments, when much meaning must be packed into a compact space. Take the three ‘ohs’ in response to Mr Weston’s news. Mrs Churchill has died. The first oh, conventional sorrow from the cast. She has left Frank a fortune. Second ‘oh’ (curiosity and interest). That might be of particular interest to Emma. Third oh (this time, Emma’s registering said interest). 

 In any transposition, something is lost, and lost here are the egregious Eltons (although well-played, they are far from their sources). Instead of the layered snobberies, they are merely farces. We never actually hear Mrs Elton speak: the couple qua couple seem to exist in the furry subculture, and just go prowling after each other, with bits of Shakespeare thrown in. Still, their animalistic coupling serves its purpose: they are ridiculous, and aren’t allowed to share the stage with Emma. Jane (a suave Julie Pope) is not the demure character of the novel, but flouncy, perfectly at ease, and (it is suggested) guilty of an ‘indiscretion’ with Frank Churchill. In the pacy world of this transposed Emma, we don’t have the time to follow the complex Dickson subplot. 

 Otherwise, Hamill’s contemporary transpositions work brilliantly. ‘Forward, onward, upward’ is Emma’s trite self-help mantra to hapless Harriet (a wry updating of Austenian heroines’ endless exertions of composure). And how about this for perfect transposition. ‘You can’t control everything’ says Mr Knightley. ‘No, but isn’t it fun to watch me try?’ This refrain erupts three times in the play, and I can’t think of anything more blithely Emma-ish updated for the twenty first century. 

Emma’s infamous insult to Miss Bates (the excellent Vanessa Severo) is reconceived, strikingly, as an indictment against the kind of useless female education that Miss Bates is inculcating (here they have her as the head of Harriet’s school). Mr Knightley rips into Emma for mocking Miss Bates for doing something useful with her life. But his remonstrance is further complicated by Miss Tayler (the elegantly intelligent Chioma Anyanwu), pointing out that Emma is only silly because she is not allowed by society to have an occupation, that she is, in fact, dreadfully bored. 

 So the happy ending, American-style, brings her not just a husband, but a decision to transfer funds to Miss Bates’ worthy school, and to teach there herself. She’s to be a have-it-all Emma, to abandon frivolity for purpose, fun for labor. If all this seemed to be getting a little freighted (and flattened) by contemporary concerns—in a pre-industrial, pre-capitalist society, cultivated leisure not paid work was the highest value in a way that we can hardly imagine, so Emma, with full independence and financial and social power, would never have traded that privileged and powerful leisure culture for the grind of wage-labor—it’s nonetheless an interesting angle, and made me think afresh. In any case, McDonough kept it thankfully ultimately light and lets frivolity reign, by not having Emma change her spots entirely. She still fantasies and plots – this time, while in the arms of the skeptical Knightley, about educating generations of daughters. Well even if she can’t control that, isn’t it fun to watch her try? 

 Finally, as a reviewer, writing in the shadows of the theater, one does not expect to be addressed from the stage head-on. So I pricked up my ears at the line where Emma saucily scolds Harriet for mixing registers: ‘Don’t trade in anachronisms; reviewers loathe it’. As a historian of early-modern Britian in my professional life, I was acutely conscious of most every anachronism in the play, but a piece which so joyously revels in anachronisms and boasts a line like that is the perfect ironic treat, worthy of Austen herself.

KC Rep presents Emma now through May 25 at the Spencer Theatre. For tickets and more information, https://kcrep.org/event/emma/

Photo by Don Ipock

Emma 1st Edition

Emma is there in full force, the fast-taking, fast-plotting Amelia Pedlow. It’s Emma with a hyperactivity disorder, excitable, restless, irresistible as in the novel. Pedlow is whip-sharp, outrageous, magnetic. It’s her stage and she owns it (or thinks she does, and does even when she doesn’t) from the very first. Emma is the most self-consciously staged of Austen’s heroines, the richest, the most independent, the most blithely self-centered. ‘It’s my show, my monologue – the play is not called Mr Knightley’ she dismisses him cheerily early on. He is played by the level-headed and kindly Grayson DeJesus. Pedlow’s comic timing is sensationally good. The venom she injects into those two words, Jane Fairfax! Insert a ‘bloody’ between them to good effect, on one occasion. Meanwhile, Emma and Churchill (a marvelously louche ladies’ man in David Toshiro Crane), these two marvelous talkers, have absolutely nothing to say to each other when they are alone. It’s brilliant. Their silence speaks for itself. 

Emma and Talley Gale as the spectacularly dim Harriet are a high-comic pairing. The latter, all subjection mirrors her mentor’s very gestures. At their first meeting, Harriet, ever following other people’s scripts, whips a note out of her pocket to remind herself of the finishing school advice to be ‘calm and rational and make a good impression’. When Harriet, asked to recite in front of Mr Elton, ditsily begins with ‘There was a young girl from Nantucket’, she is rushed on and hushed up by Emma. ‘Absolutely do not think’, Emma advises her protégée. When Emma literally makes her over to prepare her for the ball in which she is to captivate Mr Elton, using rouge, lipstick, and of course great clouds of hair-spray, it’s so much what Emma would do that we have to laugh.