Pembroke Players: Pride & Prejudice
101 Archer
Tulsa
June 1, 2024
I couldn’t have been more charmed by an invitation if Mr. Darcy had delivered it to me himself. The handwritten, wax-sealed envelopes on the ticket table at last weekend’s run of Pembroke Players’ Pride & Prejudice might have looked, at first glance, like just an endearing on-brand vehicle to get the show’s program into our hands (the brand being Jane Austen). But like many other elements of this production, that simple, winsome, accessible gesture proved to be a genuine call into a world. ”You are cordially invited to Netherfield Park,” the envelopes said — and they meant it.
In its first season as a theatre company, Pembroke Players has delivered some of the most innovative productions in the city, all using source material so familiar that your eyes might skate right across it if not for founder and director Cody McCoy’s singular vision. With an approach that reminds me of Twyla Tharp’s observation that “before you can think out of the box, you have to start with a box,” the company invites us not so much to see classic plays and literature differently, but to experience more of what’s inside them to begin with.
In this Pride & Prejudice, what could have been just a fan-service rendering of the story became a fantasia — one that illuminated facets of the original that even the most diehard Austen lovers might not have considered. McCoy (a prolific local actor, educator, and graduate of the now stupidly dismantled University of Tulsa theatre department) has been thinking about this adaptation for 13 years. That slow burn of development resulted in a production that was fully articulated on every scale, from its period costumes, sound design, and well-paced script (all created by McCoy) to its confident use of space, which placed the audience whimsically and movingly inside the novel’s dramas and dreams.
101 Archer’s first floor gallery itself was the set. We sat on three sides of an open space, with performers, furniture, and even a piano moving in and out through the crowd. With its support beams lightly draped in white tulle, the gallery’s giant wall of windows provided both backdrop and vista, a barrier that was also an opening onto a wider world. Performers sometimes stood (and even danced) outside, looking in on the action from the garden as we looked out. The audience surrounded the actors, but with their entrances and exits and subtle engagement with us, it felt like we were the ones in the middle of the story.
“To be fond of dancing was a certain step towards falling in love”: McCoy picked up this thread from the novel and ran with it, and it turned out to be key to the show’s success. In a period where self-expression was so limited by societal codes and restrictions, social dancing was a way to and through the heart; its rigor was its own kind of Tharpian “box.” Even today, who doesn’t struggle sometimes to say “I love you,” much less something more complicated like “I can’t be sure I can trust my love for you because it’s complicated and I have multiple loyalties,” etc.? In Austen’s world and McCoy’s, dancing holds the liminal space between what we can feel and know and what we can say and do — the space, in other words, of a longed-for connection and a possible freedom.
I’ve never seen dance better integrated in a work of local theatre that wasn’t explicitly a musical. The many dance sequences that punctuated this play functioned sort of like the full-page illustrations in beautiful old editions of books like this: illuminated pauses, breathing spaces that gave a moment to process what just happened and find further hints about motivation and emotion conveyed through other means than words. Far from just a series of historically informed Regency dances, these sequences were a way for the actors and the audience to slip out from the confines of language and dive further into the story — now not just being acted, but given visual pattern and dimension, visceral push and pull.
Choreographer Jen Alden merged her experience making dance for musical theatre and opera with her ongoing practice in contemporary movement and Laban Movement Analysis, creating abstract but resonant gestural motifs (a strong diagonal reach, two hands passing across the face) that evolved throughout the show, solo moments that revealed what was going unspoken (such as Elizabeth Bennet’s solo after getting Darcy’s letter, which had her twisting, tugging, feeling the weight of it), and sparkling group episodes that were tightly woven compositions and dreamy flights of fancy all at once.
Very quickly, the audience started anticipating these danced moments of insight and integration, set to rousing folk music by bands like The Oh Hellos and Tide Lines. They felt pulled from the heart of the story rather than laid on top of it, and were so exceptionally crafted and rehearsed that even the less dance-experienced members of the cast looked comfortable. Their genuine joy in the movement was contagious. As with the set design, this element of the show let us — even those not familiar with the novel — be in on it.
McCoy’s investment in the meta dance element of Austen’s story was an imaginative gamble that massively paid off in its ability to engage an audience (mirror neurons, activate!) and create a playground where a marvelous old tale could unfold as something fresh. The large ensemble cast kept the narrative bustling along, with newcomers like Themba Ndhlovu (as a refined and ardent Darcy) holding eloquent space alongside well-known Tulsa actors like Sean Rooney (as a Mr. Collins with immaculate comic timing), Madalene Steichen (as the pointed Lizzie, rich with her own private humor), and Nick Bushta (who found all the good-natured grumpy love in Mr. Bennet). And I loved the brief cacophony of overlapping recorded voices that opened the show: for me it read as, among other possibilities, a signal that we were about to experience more than one way of “telling.”
I’m very here for the fresh original plays, blockbuster musicals and contemporary dramas that fill the local theatre scene. I’m also thrilled that McCoy and his team have stepped up to deliver this missing piece — bringing to life texts that, for good reason, have hefty staying power — and to do it so impressively. With Who’s Hamlet?, Macbeth, and now Pride & Prejudice, Pembroke Players has quickly become an essential player in Tulsa theatre, inviting everyone involved to rise to the challenge of these works in a way that feels, to use a Jane Austen word, amiable.
Next from Pembroke Players: “Anne of Green Gables,” September 19 – 21
