Theatre in Review: Are the Bennet Girls OK? (Bedlam/West End Theatre)

	Elyse Steingold, Violeta Picayo. Photo: Ari Espay

In a word, no. Frankly, the Bennet Girls -- each of whom, in Emily Breeze's new play, lives on the edge of a conniption fit -- could use a nice, long vacation, a grand tour, perhaps, where they might run into some real husband material. As a chaperone, they could take along their authoress, Jane Austen, who is also in need of a break, having been, in recent theatre seasons, probed, prodded, spoofed, corrected, and otherwise subject to unflattering scrutiny. Why must Austen take it on the chin all the time? Why doesn't somebody pick on the Bronte sisters?

In Are the Bennet Girls OK?, the heroines of Pride and Prejudice chatter like a bunch of foul-mouthed sorority sisters. The dialogue is liberally salted with "likes," "literallys" and "fucks." Their pet name for the wealthy Mr. Bingley is "Bingbong." Mr. Collins, who is set to inherit the Bennet home, is identified as "the dude who is gonna own this whole shit when our dad dies." Lizzie, the book's moral center, cruelly dismisses her friend Charlotte as "used goods," adding, "She's full spinster." Mary, an also-ran in the marriage race, suffers from migraines when not pounding out torch songs on the piano. Their mother gets blotto at the dinner table and tells filthy jokes. The action is resolved by an act of murder with malice aforethought; maybe Breeze picked up a copy of Death Comes to Pemberley, P. D. James' murder mystery sequel to Pride and Prejudice. Then again, James didn't let her characters run around in bloodstained gowns.

There's about ten minutes of good material in this conception. It's fun to guess who Edoardo Benzoni, who plays all the male characters, will turn up as next: Mr. Collins, portrayed as more or less as on the spectrum, with a bottomless interest in garbage barges; the melancholic Darcy, eaten up with self-loathing over his attraction to Lizzie; or the duplicitous Wickham, here portrayed as an abusive double-talking millennial ("I just think, it's really hard to know what sunshine looks like if you've never been in the dark.") Lizzie's horrified account of Collins' marriage proposal (His pitch: "I would love to sire your brood") is pretty hilarious. And some of the sisters' casual sniping amuses. "I mean, you definitely don't dress like you care," Lydia tells Jane, getting exactly the reaction you might imagine.

But the conceit quickly wears thin, and, in any case, we've been here before. Even if Are the Bennet Girls OK? is the most extreme iteration, we've already had Kate Hamill's spoof versions of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility (the latter produced by Bedlam) and Sarah Rose Kearns' send-up of Persuasion (produced by, yes, Bedlam), all of which examined Austen through a skeptical, twenty-first-century lens. These plays had their occasional amusing moments, but their insistence on roughing up the comedy of manners genre did them no credit; next to one of the greatest writers in English literature, their efforts amounted to piffle. And so it is here.

Indeed, the anti-Austenites all make the same points: The heroines lack agency, the men are doofuses, and everyone is trapped in an unfulfilling marital game with capitalism as the ultimate villain. Oddly enough, Are the Bennet Girls OK? is best when it drops any pretense at comedy and turns starkly dramatic, for example, when Mrs. Bennet reads the riot act to Lizzie for turning down Mr. Collins -- compounding her offense, Lizzie pretends to be infertile -- laying out, in no uncertain terms, how the entire family is threatened with dispossession when Mr. Bennet dies. In another attention-getting sequence, Charlotte, who stuns Lizzie by accepting Mr. Collins' proposal, calls out her friends' many hypocrisies, insisting that she is making a loveless match in part to help out the luckless Bennets. Focusing on the institution of the entail, in this case, the passage of the Bennet estate only to a male heir -- a plot device cherished by authors from Austen through Trollope and up to Julian Fellowes, of Downton Abbey fame -- Breeze briefly gets at the uncomfortable truth that provides Pride and Prejudice with a faintly chilling undertone.

Are the Bennet Girls OK? suffers from overlength, but Eric Tucker's direction keeps things moving, relying on a cast adept at the kind of crosstalk that enlivens 1930s Hollywood screwball comedies. As Lizzie, Elyse Steingold exudes a Bridget Everett vibe that makes her formidable, if rather more hostile than Austen had in mind. Shayvawn Webster brings a welcome touch of delicacy to the proceedings as Jane, the most exposed victim of her mother's marital machinations; Deychen Volino-Gyetsa has real authority as Charlotte, whose calculations prove so shocking to Lizzie, and Masha Breeze is touching as Mary, who could use a permanent fainting couch of her own. As Mrs. Bennet, Zuzanna Szadkowski must cope with a lengthy, unfunny opening monologue and an unfortunate bit of business that has her mounting the dinner table in a drunken rage, but she adds considerable heft to her big confrontation with Lizzie.

The lighting, by Eric Southern and Cheyenne Sykes, is discreet when it needs to be and wildly theatrical when called for; the latter includes a saturated purple wash for Mary's fruitless epistolary pursuit of Mr. Collins and the rock-out finale, which features the cast sashaying down John McDermott's catwalk set. Mariah Anzaldo Hale's costumes include several witty twists on the Empire silhouette. Tucker's sound design takes in music selections ranging from atonal to English folk to Brazilian jazz.

If anything, I suppose that Are the Bennet Girls OK? proves the extraordinary hold that Austen maintains on our collective imagination two centuries after her death. But, similar to the recent run of musicals about disillusioned heroines from fairy tales and literature (& Juliet, Bad Cinderella, Once Upon a One More Time) or feminist commentary on The Crucible (Becky Nurse of Salem, The Good John Proctor, John Proctor is the Villain), some ideas burn out from overuse. As for Austen: Can we declare that this ground has been thoroughly tilled, and it is time to move on? --David Barbour