Saving Miss Bennet

No, this is not my (becoming) annual Clarence the Angel adventure in redemption. Previously we have saved Mr. Potter (from It's a Wonderful Life), Miss Fezziwig (A Christmas Carol), and Mr. Sawyer (Miracle on 34th Street). This post's title is inspired by the new "rolling world premiere" of some delightful Jane Austen fan fiction now gracing the stage of the Round House Theatre, titled Miss Bennet, Christmas at Pemberley.

To be fair, Jane Austen has inspired a lot of fan fiction (there's even something to do with zombies, I hear), but I will say the Miss Bennet piece, focusing on the Jan Brady of all Bennet sisters, righteous and scholarly Mary, is true to Jane's wit and writing style (more so in the first act than the second). Two years have passed since the marriages of her older sisters, and Mary has had the chance to mature and develop her musical abilities and her scholarly pursuits. Yet she retains a smug superiority and crankiness that keep her relateable as a flawed human, unlike her perfectly perfect older sisters. (The play brings back younger married sister Lydia but omits the penultimate of the five, Kitty, with even less to distinguish herself than Mary.)

The problem with Mary, and perhaps for the actress who plays her in this production, Katie Kleiger, is that she inevitably disappears when her two older, far more interesting sisters are in the same room with her. Maybe that's my problem, since the two older sisters are played by two of my favorite local actresses, Erin Weaver as Elizabeth and Katie deBuys as Jane. (And speaking of favorites, it's always a pleasure to feast on the chiseled features of Danny Gavigan, this production's Mr. Darcy.)

I will credit the authors, Lauren Gunderson and Margot Melcon, with a surprising but appropriate love interest for Mary in the form of Darcy's distant cousin Arthur (William Vaughan) and a complication in the form of Anne de Bourgh (Kathryn Tkel), the daughter of the recently expired Lady Catherine. The twist is that sickly Anne has inherited her late mother's imperious self-importance, complicating matters for the protagonists.

I'll also credit the authors for doing something even Jane Austen never quite succumbed to, which was to create happy endings for characters we'd been accustomed to dismissing as unworthy of either attention or affection. This is what I've been trying to do in my own "Saving So-and-So" series here. They just do it better than I do!

So, Mary Bennet having been saved by worthy writers, I'm still obliged to rescue some of my own favorite egregiously left-behind characters. Will give it some more thought. My candidates right now are Susan from the MacMillan Toy Company (Big), who lost the love of her life when Josh (Tom Hanks) went back to being 13, and Heaven Can Wait's Max Corkle, the trainer for the Rams who lost his friend Joe Pendelton once our dear Mr. Jordan found a suitable football player for Joe to reincarnate into. Joe walked off with the girl but left poor Max behind. I always hated that.

Love, hosaa
No character left behind