By Jessica Bedford
My friend, KC, had an idea. As a veteran of the theatre, she was well aware of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Abridged. (Perhaps many of you saw this zany piece back in the summer of 2023, produced outdoors by PSF starring Philadelphia’s funniest clown and handsomest man, Sean Close. (Disclaimer: He is my husband.)) It’s a loving but cheeky homage to the great William Shakespeare: his plays are given their own unique re-interpretive twist, told by a trio of clowns in about two hours. KC was struck by this piece, largely by the success and the adoration for it. She thought, “You know who has just as much of a cult following, just as much of a fan base, is equally adored and also a genius of a writer? Jane Austen.”
And so the title—The Complete Works of Jane Austen, Abridged—sat in her brain, a germ of a seed far underneath the soil, just waiting for the right circumstances, and the right collaborators for it to burst forth into … well, what’s the tree equivalent of Jane Austen? I don’t think it’s a “mighty oak”… maybe a “lovely willow?” Perhaps a “particularly scenic birch”? I think I’m getting off the point so let me get back to it:
Fast forward to several years later, when I was lucky enough to work on a production of Lauren Gunderson’s The Revolutionists at Theatre Horizon, directed by KC. This play is a radical piece that reimagines the French revolution from a feminist perspective, equally emotionally touching and completely irreverent. KC was directing and I was playing Gunderson’s imaginative Marie Antoinette, one part Paris Hilton Valley girl clown, one part Cassandra-like genius. Meghan Winch was also working on that production as dramaturg and Charlotte Northeast was playing the historical feminist playwright Olympe de Gouge. We made a great piece of theatre. But something else also happened: we found our tribe within our tribe.
Let me be clear: the larger tribe was theatre folks, many of us theatre nerds find each other somewhere around high school’s most socially painful years or thereabouts. The sub-tribe: theatre-making Janeites. When we were meant to be rehearsing, we’d have riotous arguments about which novel was best, which novel was most underrated, which villain was officially THE WORST (I think we decided on Lucy Steele), and who was Team Bingley vs Team Darcy (you CANNOT be both). After the show closed, the seed that was so long under the ground for KC burst into an email sent to Meghan, Charlotte, and me. She asked us if we wanted to write a play with her called (drum roll, please) The Complete Works of Jane Austen, Abridged.
KC was then and is now the Artistic Director of a theatre company called Tiny Dynamite in Philadelphia. The proposal was that the four of us would write together as a group over the course of the year and then the play would premiere that following June at her theatre. But here’s the catch: we had no idea what we were writing. We only had a title! So, to call the generative process of this play a “writing” process is perhaps generous. It was really four women who really liked each other together in one of our homes, talking about something that they also really liked. We went through several early rosé-fueled iterations: Maybe the title was a frame for a book group who in order to win some regional title is charged with putting on all of Jane Austen’s stories? Maybe a traveling theatre company accidentally portmanteaus all of Jane Austen’s works into one silly mashup, using the various character types that Austen so frequently relies upon?
But all of this is exposition. Where we really hit the point of attack—that moment structurally within a story where objective meets obstacle and the rising action kicks off and up—was when a member of the original company, an actor, let’s just call him Harry, who was to play all the very important dudes in Austen’s work actually booked a six month contract in New York City, left the group and Philadelphia. Who. Was. Going. To. Be. The. Dudes.
(Wickham! Knightley! Henry Tilney! Oh my!) This real-life moment would prove the creative spark we needed.
KC woke up at 4am the next morning and scribbled what you will find is the first scene of the play. From there, we found our invitation through what we wanted the play to be and each of those invitations came from Austen’s own writing. If it was our own Janeite nerd culture that had united as friends and now writers, why not look to each of the stories and unpack how each of them had their own proud nerdish aesthetic? I’d like to tell you exactly how we did that, but no spoilers here. You’ll have to come see the show.
Harry’s departure also meant that we now needed to recast the Dude role and the wonderful Trevor William Fayle joined the company. This was, at first, terrifying. Trevor knew nothing about Austen. But what we first feared was a weakness proved one of our most-valuable assets. After all, we didn’t want to just create a Janeite play for other Janeites. We wanted to create a piece that revered Austen and showed others—the newbies—why they should revere her work, too. Our nerd-dom has an open-door policy. Trevor became the first reader of all our new pages. He pointed out the holes created by assumed knowledge, he showed where our in-speak needed translating, and, most excitingly, brought new perspectives as the year of writing unfolded and he had time to start to read Austen’s writing for himself, for the very first time.
What I hope you’re catching onto here is that this is a work born of utter joy and friendship. In fact, our friendship is so intrinsic to these pages, that I feared when we opened it, it would never have legs beyond us. How could anybody else possibly take it on? How lovely to have been so very wrong. Not only has this piece had many productions across regional theater in the United States, it’s also been produced in Switzerland, in Australia and currently has a running tour going in the UK. Turns out that some pretty good stuff comes out of friendship and joy.
Finally, I want to say how special it is to bring the play to PSF. Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival is artistically home for me. I trained here, worked as an actor and as a director here, and now I’m a produced playwright here. I know the walls of Labuda so very well. I hope that when you step into the Schubert you feel that you are entering Jane Austen’s world but that she is also entering ours; that our love letter to her and all of her fans (new fans, old fans, yet-to-be fans) brings her back to life, if just for an evening. See you at the theatre.