Love of Intrigue

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Self-anointed revolutionaries and other theoreticians have tried throughout this century to make the theater esoteric and archetypal, depicting a delirious dreamscape, an incantatory religious ritual, a shower of aimless verbal fireworks or perhaps a murmured hint of psychotic menace. Too often setting such moods has been an end in itself rather than a means to what satisfies audiences: telling a coherent, affecting story. In the effort to avoid being old-fashioned, to prove that the stage has an authentic voice beyond the naturalism commonly found in film and TV, theater directors often turn their backs on narrative or at least overlook basic flaws in the plausibility of characters and the logic of plots. They take, in effect, a rock-video approach to their craft.

Old-fashioned is precisely the description that the avant-garde would attach to Briton David Pownall's Pride and Prejudice, being given its U.S. premiere in a meticulous production by Kenneth Frankel at New Haven's Long Wharf Theater. Shrewdly and wittily adapted from Jane Austen's classic 1813 novel, Pownall's tale has a beginning, middle and end. Its intrigues of love, marriage and social climbing unfold in period costume on representational sets. The characters are affectionate exaggerations of recognizable types. This is satire without much bite: the play's boldest statements are that there is more to life than marriage, even for Austen's young women and their eager mothers, and that love should overcome distinctions of class or money.

Like its source, this Pride and Prejudice makes spectators care about the fates of some very silly and shallow people, endowing them with no heroism but great vulnerability and charm. Pownall, 47, has plucked out the essentials from Austen. There is the tug-of-war wedlock of the middle-aged Bennets, she (Marge Redmond) a worrier and a conniver, he (Richard Kiley) a detached and almost enigmatic amateur scholar. There is the frustrating courtship dance between the Bennets' clever, winsome daughter Elizabeth (Jane Kaczmarek) and the rich Mr. Darcy (Peter Gallagher), both too proud to recognize the inevitability of their union. And there is the misguided infatuation of the Bennets' dim daughter Lydia (Jane Fleiss) with a handsome scoundrel.

Each story is told with gentle self-mockery, teaching the inexhaustible lesson that appearances are deceiving. The actors understand that the essence of being stylish is ease and zest, not straining for artificial mannerisms. Pownall (also author of Master Class) merges the wry, knowing voice of the novel's narrator with the character of Mr. Bennett, whom Austen describes as "a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humor, reserve and caprice." That fusion provides a moral center, and Kiley gives perhaps his finest performance since Man of La Mancha as a father who really does know best. --W.A.H. III