The best Christmas presents are the ones you don’t know you are getting. Oh, you notice the box, hiding on the far side of the tree — the box just the size for a shirt or a sweater the Houston climate gives you few chances to wear.
But come unwrapping time, this unassuming package turns out to be, not just a “thing” you thought no one knew you wanted but a symbol that you are known and loved and thought of — the gift everyone can use!
Such is the present Main Street Theater offers this holiday season in its production of “Georgiana and Kitty,” the third play in Lauren Gunderson and Margot Melcon’s “Christmas at Pemberley” trilogy: three imaginative journeys into the world of Jane Austen’s best-known novel, “Pride and Prejudice” sometime after the wedding of Elizabeth Bennet to Mr. Darcy, the owner of the vast Pemberley estate.
Like its predecessors in the trilogy, “Georgiana and Kitty” captures the never-unnerving comedy of manners among these people whose most difficult challenges are common ones: finding a suitable mate and living with one’s family.
Austen’s novels typically stressed the first of these, but the Pemberley plays focus more on the second — something Kitty Bennet captures early in this production when she says of her four sisters, “I do love them, but they are impossible.”
However, the gift of “Georgiana and Kitty” is more than delightful froth. Gunderson and Melcon have wisely let the characters grow, and this growth causes them — particularly the titular characters: Georgiana, the sister of Mr. Darcy, and Kitty, the fourth of the Bennet sisters — to chaff against the limitations forced on them as women. Yet, rather than make their situation a screed for today’s feminist ideals, the play focuses on the qualities that empower women’s progress. “I do not doubt us,” Kitty remarks to Georgiana, “but I doubt everyone else.” Their friendship and Georgiana’s determination “to be heard” in a man’s world blend with Austen’s interest in romance and marriage to paint both a more comic work than the previous trilogy plays and a more moving one.
It helps that the cast, many of them players in Main Street’s previous productions of earlier plays in the trilogy, skillfully let their characters develop. Chaney Moore as Mary Bennet, the focus of the first play in the series, accepts a shrinking of her role. Moore makes the bookish and withdrawn Mary into a striking grace note that names the diversity among the sisters. Alexandra Szeto-Joe, as the youngest Bennet, also stills and softens her character. Her Lydia is less infantile and self-centered but far from totally tamed. Most impressive, however, is the performance of Spencer Plachy as Mr. Darcy. Largely a handsome but rigid stick-in-the-mud in the previous plays, Plachy makes him a more complex figure: a man seeking to fulfill society’s vision of the dominant male but also one abounding in love for both his wife and his sister. He slowly develops the wisdom Austen’s novel assumes he always has, and his growth alongside his sister’s development as a woman and a musician is key to the production’s emotional power.
As the play’s title characters, actors Lindsay Ehrhardt (Georgiana) and Clara Marsh (Kitty) embody the bond of friendship between two people their culture leaves at the margins. Ehrhardt’s Georgiana radiates a fragility that makes her older brother’s protectiveness understandable, but the actress also shows her resisting the urge to accept being shielded from the possibility of pain and disappointment — resistance that motivates Georgiana as an artist. In contrast, Marsh creates Kitty as a woman learning to trust her practical skills, organizing and planning and managing a household, without hiding her abilities behind modest protestations and without using those talents to dominate her friend. Together, they form the engine that digs out a place for women in the world without dismantling the world as Jane Austen knew it.
The production has a large cast, and the play rightly allows some to remain simple types. The actors all do fine jobs, but the script can’t allow all of them to obtain the degree of fullness and complexity that they have in Austen’s novel. Rather, they fit into the ensemble and contribute to the plot’s progression gracefully — a balancing of talents well-managed by director Robin Robinson.
The set, too, fits well into the ideas of the show. Act I opens in a Pemberley drawing room with a Christmas tree that plays a key part in the previous two plays present but off center — a sign that a tree indoors just might be acceptable. For Act II, the location shifts to Georgiana’s London townhouse, and Ryan McGettigan’s set pieces literally open up to form the backdrop of her home — a nice parallel to the opening that takes place in the character’s lives.
As Main Street’s gift to the Houston area for the holidays, “Georgiana and Kitty” delivers a delight that exceeds expectations, bringing a modern sense to Austen’s sensibility and wisely letting that sensibility guide the action to a happy ending that it celebrates with a rendition of the old Christmas standard, “Joy to the World.” It has seldom sounded so appropriate.
“Georgiana and Kitty: Christmas at Pemberley” is at Houston’s Main Street Theatre through Dec. 23.
Robert Donahoo is a professor at Sam Houston State University and writes theater reviews for The Courier.
