Pride and Prejudice at UT's B. Iden Payne Theatre is a beautiful, graceful production. This is a musical text, and not only because of the jigs and reels at the balls sponsored by cheerful Mr. Bingley. Jane Austen's familiar novel about impoverished young ladies and their ultimately successful romances is written largely in dialogue, with cadence, understatement, wit, parry and riposte, quite as if it were a verbal score.
No wonder it has been so successfully translated to the cinema, again and again, and no wonder all 495 seats in the theatre appeared to be filled on opening night. James Maxwell's adaptation gives us much of that familiar dialogue verbatim and all the familar characters.
The surprise of love . . . The University of Texas Department of Theatre and Dance presents Jane Austen's classic novel adapted for the stage Pride and Prejudice
November 13 – 22, 2009 at the B. Iden Payne Theatre.
James Maxwell adapts Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen's timeless novel, originally published in 1813. The highly plot-driven comedy of manners set in 1811 centers on the Bennet family, a comfortable, but not excessively wealthy family living in the countryside of England. As the Bennets have five daughters and no sons, Mrs. Bennet's main objective in life is to find (wealthy) husbands for her daughters and retain Longbourn, the family estate, in the Bennet name. When Jane, the eldest daughter, falls in love with a wealthy landowner named Charles Bingle, Mrs. Bennet believes her problems solved. Bingly's snobbish family and his close friend and acquaintance Fitzwilliam Darcy have other ideas.
