Lafayette Campus News (www.lafayette.edu), March 4, 2008 — Jacqueline Macri ’09 (Malvern, Pa.) is a Marquis Scholar majoring in psychology. She is playing the role of Elizabeth Bennet in the Lafayette College Theater production of Pride and Prejudice, directed by Mary Jo Lodge, assistant professor of English. The show will be performed at 8 p.m. on each evening of March 5-8. The following is a first-hand account of Macri’s experiences during the rehearsal process.
“Can we do that again?” This request is not an unusual one for any cast of actors to hear in rehearsal when a scene proves particularly troubling. However, for the Lafayette cast of Jon Jory’s stage adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, the phrase warrants particularly prolonged groans, sighs, and even squawks of exasperation as it now additionally serves to remind us that the British high society pronunciation of the phrase’s last word—agaayyyn—has for the nth time been neglected by some unsuspecting cast member. Paired with the fast pace of our story, little challenges such as these have kept our heads full and, occasionally, resting resignedly in our hands.
However consuming the little details can be, though, we cast members should only feel so lucky that a single word is now the most of our worries where period accuracy is concerned. Since for most of us, Regency Era England is only as familiar as can be after viewing a Masterpiece Theater presentation, understanding the minds of our characters has proved a particularly daunting task.
In our current society, our college students merit praise and reward by being as career-oriented as possible; we pride ourselves on our hard work and, at our best, find ourselves trying to unload our schedules. In light of this, we struggled to understand how our characters, living in a society that considered the absence of a career the sign of high society (if only), filled their schedules in the first place. In my personal quest for grasping this concept, I tried to meticulously analyze Austen’s every line, attempting over and over to suspend my own reality and mentally walk myself through a day in a Bennet daughter’s life. Though this process was helpful, I always felt that I was missing something.
Ironically, the element of the script which I thought would be the most troublesome in accomplishing any of this — its extremely abridged nature — turned out to be a crafty solution to my concern. The script does not feature many of the book’s leisurely moments due to the time constraints of a play; in this sense, events and emotions do not stew for long before their repercussions cause an eruption just a few pages later.
As we established a pace in rehearsal, however, it became increasingly clear to me that this line of major moments creates a responsibility in the cast to craft each scene and interaction with extreme focus on the core sentiment being established among characters. In this sense, Jory allows us to play in their world, but we are always brought back to the pure experience of a human character — whether it is the pain of misunderstanding, the embarrassment of exposing one’s flaws, or most wonderfully, another’s total acceptance of them — that reaches across hundreds of years.
Now, after five weeks of rehearsal, though I admittedly find myself occasionally wondering how many hours a young lady of polished society could spend decorating hats before she ran out money, space, or sanity, it is certainly parallel that these three luxuries are just as elusive in the present day as they were for the Bennets, after all. Though social parallels may be few, their story and their struggles continue to surface throughout all times and societies—agayn, and agayn, and agayn.
