When Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice appeared in 1813, it arrived in the form of a “triple-decker”: a novel printed in three separate volumes expanding the work’s reach to middle-class readers who could ill-afford luxuries such as books. In our day, Austen, and particularly Pride and Prejudice, seem to continually grow their audiences thanks a near infinite appetite for her sexually pure prose that no school board could censor and thanks, too, to a life and works cinematic enough for theater screens and flexible enough to bend into other genres—think “Death Comes to Pemberly” by P.D. James and films such as “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.”
And of course, there is Lauren Gunderson and Margot Melcon’s trilogy of “Christmas at Pemberley” plays, the third of which, “Georgiana and Kitty” is now on stage at Houston’s Main Street Theater.
One is tempted to ask in a Scrooge-ish moment, what’s the attraction?
For Gunderson and Melcon, one answer could be that, like the triple-decker format, a trilogy of plays offers an enlarged platter from which to sate the desire for more helpings of Austen. But writers as talented as these are more attracted by the vacant spaces Austen leaves in her works. As Kitty, one of the Bennet sisters, complains in this production, “In two years of letters, you have not asked one thing about me.” So, there are things to tell, letters to be written, and Gunderson and Melcon fill in such gaps—particularly the one after the pages of “Pride and Prejudice” reach their end. Doing so, they are in good company. Austen’s nephew wrote in a memoir, so says the Web, that Kitty, after the novel ends, makes a respectable marriage match to a clergyman posted near the Darcy estate!
For anyone who has missed previous productions of “Georgiana and Kitty: Christmas at Pemberley,” this third play focuses less on Elizabeth and Fitzwilliam Darcy than on Mr. Darcy’s unmarried sister Georgiana and Elizabeth’s younger sister Kitty: two shy women who have formed a deep friendship from their places in the alcoves of their families. Within the standard marriage plot central to all of Austen’s novels, Georgiana and Kitty wind their way amid less-than-ideal relatives and the 19th century attitudes about class and a woman’s place. Mr. Darcy is overbearing; Lydia is callously flighty, and Mary is blunt and buried in books. And when two unattached young men arrive to celebrate Christmas with the Darcy and Bennet clans, the scene is set to dramatize Austen’s famous mocking dictum: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
In this context, Gunderson and Melcon have provided a script that balances conflict with humor, anguish with the comedy of love that carries to the play’s closing chorus of “Joy to the World.” But as modern female writers, the authors also have much to mix in concerning art and gender. Nevertheless, ideological pronouncements are, true to Austen’s world, muted notes that serve largely to advance the plot and fill out the characters—all of whom are delightfully realized to the extent the script allows.
Many of the actors, having played their characters in earlier seasons at Main Street, bring to them a sharpness, a crispness that is gloriously entertaining, and they mesh like the gears of a stately grandfather clock. As Georgiana, Lindsay Ehrhardt brings a salting of quirkiness to her performance—just enough to remind us that artists are different from us ordinary folk and yet setting up perfectly her “Doll’s House” like maturation without leading to Nora Helmer’s outcome. As Kitty, Clara Marsh is quieter, more overtly conventional, but ultimately more daring. Her Kitty is sure of what she wants and perfectly able to obtain it — even as her sense of knowing what’s best needs and gets some taming. As Mr. Darcy, Spencer Plachy captures perfectly Darcy’s cartoonish rigor and British stiff deportment. He looks the part; he sounds the part; and in doing so, makes his ultimate relenting a great moment in the show.
Directed by Jessica Jave, these and other superb actors produce an evening as sweet as Walker’s Shortbread. And though the show is a full two acts long, set in two locations, and spanning six years in time, Jave keeps the production moving at a hoof-clattering pace—much faster than an Austen read.
In short, “Georgiana and Kitty: Christmas at Pemberley” is light but literate entertainment, cunningly designed and staged for the holiday season. Unwrap it and plunge into the English fantasy world of one of our language’s great storytellers. You’ll look forward to starting the series over again next Christmas.
“Georgiana and Kitty: Christmas at Pemberley” is on stage at Houston’s Main Street Theater through December 21.
Robert Donahoo is a professor at Sam Houston State University and writes theater reviews for The Courier.