THEATER

Bedlam Theater Group
Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

We saw this production two years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it.  We are returning.

Review: A Whirlwind of Delicious Gossip in ‘Sense & Sensibility’

Pray do not be alarmed, gentle readers, but I am here to tell you that Jane Austen has been pumped full of helium. Now you might think that the injection of such an alien element would warp, if not altogether explode, that fabled “little bit (two inches wide) of ivory” on which Austen said she worked.

Yet the Bedlam theater company’s version of her “Sense & Sensibility,” which opened on Thursday night at the Gym at Judson, expands and magnifies Austen’s delicate comic worldview without cracking a single teacup. First presented for a short run in repertory in 2014, this enchanting romp of a play has returned on its own, with a few adjustments, but with its buoyant spirits, cunning stagecraft and enlivening insights intact.

As adapted for the stage by Kate Hamill and directed by Eric Tucker, “Sense & Sensibility” might be described as Jane Austen for those who don’t usually like Jane Austen, finding her work too reserved for lively entertainment. Yet I would imagine that even fanatical Janeites, as her most devoted admirers are known, will not take offense, once they get used to this production’s audaciously high energy level.

For while the Bedlam “Sense & Sensibility” may seem to take daring liberties with its source’s quiet sensibility, it never violates the original novel’s uncommon sense — of values, of society, of human frailties. Austen’s abiding themes emerge in heightened and often illuminating relief here.

Given that your response to the early scenes will probably be surprised, riotous laughter, you are equally likely to find yourself shedding discreet tears — the kind that cry out for cambric handkerchiefs — by the end. This misty-eyed state is induced not just by Austen’s artistry in setting to rights a world at odds with itself, but also by a troupe’s triumphant joy in giving such defiantly theatrical form to a literary narrative.

The company of players, in this case, numbers 10. While these performers are required to embody several times their weight in assorted characters, this is an epic cast by the standards of Bedlam, whose vibrant productions of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” and Shaw’s “Saint Joan” featured skeletal ensembles of four.

But “Sense & Sensibility” shares the company’s signature approach of do-it-yourself resourcefulness, by which crowded and jostling landscapes are created through minimal means. As designed by John McDermott (set), Les Dickert (lighting) and Angela Huff (costumes), this production allows us to see Austen’s world taking shape before our eyes, a process that includes watching its thoroughly contemporary cast shimmy back into the era of Regency England.

We first encounter them all as themselves, drifting between the audience and the visible dressing area at one end of the stage. They assemble, still in civilian clothes, for a rowdy, rave-style dance that, by degrees, segues into something like a country ball gavotte. (Alexandra Beller is the choreographer.) They wriggle out of their early-21st-century clothes and into freehand approximations of early-19th-century garments.

And suddenly, they’re all talking at once, wildly and obsessively — to us, to one another, to themselves. What we’re hearing is a whirlwind of gossip, of voices bearing conflicting truths and falsehoods about love affairs and scandals, independent incomes and inherited real estate.

Such gossip is the architect of Austen’s society. And perhaps the most ingenious element of Mr. Tucker’s production is its use of gossip as the force that shapes the destinies of Austen’s characters. No matter how private the scene, there are always eavesdroppers nearby, waiting to spread and reconfigure the latest rumors.

The primary subjects of those rumors are the female members of the family newly dispossessed by the death of old John Dashwood (John Russell). There are his widow, Mrs. Dashwood (Samantha Steinmetz), and their three daughters: Elinor (endowed with a wonderfully anxious equanimity by Andrus Nichols), the eldest and most sensible of the lot; Marianne (a delightfully volatile Ms. Hamill), the determined romantic; and Margaret (Jessica Frey), the youngest.

Then there are the uncertain suitors of Elinor and Marianne, who include the diffident Edward Ferrars (Jason O’Connell, who doubles hilariously as his character’s loutish younger brother), the roguish John Willoughby (John Russell) and the stalwart Colonel Brandon (Edmund Lewis). Before the story’s end, hearts will be pledged and broken in various combinations among these and other characters, with every permutation attended by a chorus of kibitzers.

In addition to assuming new identities at the drop of a wig or a pair of pince-nez, the cast members are responsible for pushing the scenery into place. (The ensemble is rounded out, with unstinting verve, by Laura Baranik, Stephan Wolfert and Gabra Zackman.)

Nearly everything in Mr. McDermott’s set — tables, chairs, a settee, French doors and trellises — is on casters. And furniture is being constantly rearranged (often at dizzying speed) to denote not only changes of place but also of emotional temperature.

Moments of public humiliation are expanded into nightmare sequences in which revolving furniture suggests a world spinning off its axis. Even quiet tête-à-têtes are punctuated by the expressive repositioning of the chairs in which the speakers sit.

The overall effect is of a tidal social flux coursing beneath the stationary drawing rooms that Austen’s characters inhabit. Even more than Ang Lee’s fine 1995 film of “Sense and Sensibility,” this version captures the vertiginous apprehensions that lie within a seemingly quiet novel about the rewards of resignation.

Though the moral choices made by Austen’s characters are of undeniable importance, their lives are never entirely their own. The talk of their friends, relatives and even people they have never met propels would-be lovers into blunders, blindness, revelations and, with the divine dispensation at a novelist’s command, happy nuptials, if they’re lucky.

The real wonder of Bedlam’s accomplishment here isn’t so much the exciting animation it brings to a work regarded (wrongly) by some readers as too static to compel. It’s the transformation of gossip into a dynamic, palpable force that shapes both collective societies and individual destinies. As it turns out, that force has a lot in common with the narrative impulse of hotly told stories that make irresistible theater.