THEATER

The Blackbox Theater
Sense & Sensibility - Jane AustenD

"Directed by Eric Tucker, Kate Hamill’s rollicking, highly theatrical, brand new adaptation of Jane Austen’s beloved novel follows the fortunes (and misfortunes) of the Dashwood sisters–the very sensitive Elinor, and the hypersensitive Marianne.  Set in gossipy 18th Century England, SENSE & SENSIBILITY examines our reactions (both reasonable and ridiculous) to societal pressures. When reputation is everything, how do you follow your heart?  This world premiere is presented by Bedlam, whose Off-Broadway repertory productions of SAINT JOAN and HAMLET last season, received critical acclaim and multiple award nominations.

SENSE & SENSIBILITY features: Laura Baranik, Nigel Gore, Kate Hamill, Andrus Nichols, Jason O’Connell, John Russell, Vaishnavi Sharma, Samantha Steinmetz, Eric Tucker, and Stephan Wolfert.  Runs in rotating repertory with THE SEAGULL.

Committed to the immediacy of the relationship between the actor and the audience BEDLAM creates theatre in a flexible, raw space and is interested in contemporary reappraisals of the classics, new writing and small-scale musical theatre.

The theatre we make always includes the audience. Storytelling is paramount to us. We believe that innovative use of space can collapse aesthetic distance and bring the audience into direct contact with the dangers and delicacies of life––inciting laughter and chaos, exciting thinking and recreating the thrill of lived experience."

Last season we attended two performance by Bedlam, Saint Joan by Shaw and Hamlet by Shakespeare.  They did both plays with all the characters with only 4 actors, 3 men and 1 woman!  They are very creative and very good.

Interestingly, we sat directly next to Ben Brantley, the theater critic for the New York Times.  Through his reviews, he literally makes and breaks shows in New York.



I will attach his review of the performance we saw when it's published.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Brantley

Here's Brantley's review...

THEATER | THEATER REVIEW

In Austen and Chekhov, a Test of Versatility

'Seagull' and 'Sense and Sensibility,' From Bedlam Company

SENSE & SENSIBILITY NYT Critics' Pick THE SEAGULL

By BEN BRANTLEYNOV. 26, 2014

Members of the troupe Bedlam in an adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel "Sense and Sensibility," in repertory with a new version of Chekhov’s “The Seagull,” at the Sheen Center.

Gossip gallops in Bedlam’s invigorating stage version of Jane Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility,” which runs through Dec. 21 at the Sheen Center. The would-be and might-have-been lovers in this enchantingly athletic take on the perils of Austen-style courtship, adapted by Kate Hamill and directed by Eric Tucker, find themselves pushed and pulled by the forces of speculation run rampant.

Why, a young woman can’t take tea with a friend without feeling that prying eyes and ears are pressed against the walls and windows, a sentiment to which the ensemble gives literal and very funny life. An ever-rising Babel of voices sometimes overrides the dialogue. And the scenery, which turns out to be highly mobile, has been mounted on casters, since it takes a well-oiled set of wheels to keep up with the velocity of rumor.

And you thought Jane Austen was all sedentary sitting around and sewing.

No troupe in New York these days rides the storytelling momentum of theater more resourcefully or enthusiastically than Bedlam. Last winter, using a cast of only four, this company performed Shaw’s “Saint Joan” and Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” in repertory (also under Mr. Tucker’s direction), with an engrossing energy and narrative ingenuity that made these wordy, worthy dramas feel like suspenseful Olympic events.

Photo

From left, Nigel Gore, Jason O’Connell, Andrus Nichols and Stephan Wolfert, all part of the Bedlam company, in Kate Hamill’s adaptation of “Sense and Sensibility” at the Sheen Center.

After that, you might think that Mr. Tucker and his producing director (and frequent leading lady) Andrus Nichols would retire to a spa for a year or two. But here they are again, fewer than 12 months later, alternating high-octane Austen with a loose-jointed production of Chekhov’s “The Seagull,” a play notorious for thwarting the most accomplished thespians.

The Bedlam “Seagull” isn’t the unconditional delightful that “Hamlet” and “Saint Joan” were and that “Sense and Sensibility” is. But it has an easygoing accessibility that suggests there’s no reason to be afraid of Anton Chekhov. Besides, it’s fun to see the same cast playing different characters, and in a relatively relaxed mode. After the dervishlike exertions required by “Sense and Sensibility,” this troupe’s “Seagull” almost feels like, to borrow another Russian play title, a month in the country.

Though a favorite of moviemakers in recent years (starting with Ang Lee’s sleeper hit “Sense and Sensibility” in 1995), Austen’s novels have never lent themselves naturally to the stage, even as drawing-room comedies. Their introspective heroines and sotto voce tone seem to call for the searching close-ups of cinema.

Ms. Hamill and Mr. Tucker have sidestepped the problem by transposing Austen into the key of Dickens. Theirs is a bouncy, jaunty take on Austen, with a 10-member cast taking on an assortment of roles that are always clearly defined, sometimes as graphically as caricatures by the Dickens illustrator Phiz.

“Heresy!” you might cry, especially if you happen to be a member of that fanatical tribe known as Janeites. Yet if this “Sense and Sensibility” offers a larger, less delicate canvas than the metaphoric “two inches of ivory” on which Austen said she composed, it also remains remarkably true to the values and priorities of its source.

A student required to read “Sense and Sensibility” as a class assignment should be able to pass an exam on that novel’s themes simply by attending this show (not that I am advocating such a shortcut, I promise). The classic Austen preoccupations with real estate, income, class, reputation and equilibrium in life are all rendered brightly and legibly here.

So is the dichotomy of the title, embodied by the elder Dashwood sisters, Elinor (Ms. Nichols) and Marianne (Ms. Hamill), who find their fortunes and matrimonial opportunities sadly reduced by the death of their father, who left his estate to their stepbrother. As the younger Marianne, Ms. Hamill (yes, our inventive playwright) exists in an entertaining state of feverish animation.

The wiser, older Elinor is more contemplative and restrained. But Ms. Nichols’s centered, nuanced performance gives her an emotional transparency that allows us to see that in Austen the quiet suffer as intensely as, and perhaps more sincerely than, the loud. And this Elinor is nicely partnered by Jason O’Connell as her hesitant, insecure aspiring suitor, Edward Ferrars.

Mr. O’Connell also shows up as Edward’s younger, swaggering brother, Robert, and though the costume remains the same, you have no difficulty telling one from the other. Such transitions are part of the joy of a Bedlam production. And just watch how Laura Baranik and Samantha Steinmetz, with the aid of that rolling furniture, conduct conversations between two older and younger sets of characters in a drawing room scene.

Most of the cast doubles, triples and quadruples in roles, including servants, foxhounds and members of that buzzing chorus of gossips. In “The Seagull,” each has only one part to play, and you can’t fully appreciate their flexibility unless you’ve seen them in the Austen as well.

Ms. Steinmetz, for example, is terrific as Medevenko, the whiny schoolteacher (and future husband of the depressive Masha, superbly played by Ms. Nichols, who I’m beginning to think can do anything). Mr. Tucker, who played a bustling, wagging-tongued dowager in “Sense,” also undergoes a sex change to become the brooding young playwright Konstantin in “The Seagull.” (Ms. Baranik is his punk-rock Nina.) And Vaishnavi Sharma, who is most convincing as the youngest and silliest of the Dashwood sisters, is equally so as the worldly, middle-aged actress Arkadina, Konstantin’s mother.

This “Seagull” has been adapted and modernized by the young British playwright Anya Reiss, who sets the play on the Isle of Man and makes freehanded use of cellphones, laptops and marijuana. As performed here, the production can feel a bit like a thoughtful, generous-spirited acting class.

Not everyone is equally well cast or equally at ease here. (Mr. O’Connell is as diffident playing Trigorin, the caddish novelist, as he is as Edward Ferrars.) But there’s something affecting about seeing pliable, willing performers taking on difficult roles — even roles that don’t naturally suit them — in such close quarters.

And while Bedlam doesn’t go in for a lot of self-conscious fourth-wall breaking, it prefaces both of its current productions by having the cast members roam casually among the audience. When they finally gather onstage, they dance a bit, free form, shaking out the kinks and inhibitions the way one often does at a party or discothèque. Costumes are donned and offed before our eyes.

This dancing is partly a warm-up for the cast members. But it’s also a way to relax the audience. “We’re all in this together,” they seem to be telling us. “We’re going to pretend we’re somebody else for a while, and we need you to believe us. Really, it’s going to be fun.” And with all our imaginations thus limbered up, the storytelling begins, at full gallop.