EMMA

Actors’ Shakespeare Project

Cambridge Multi-Cultural Arts Center

November 14-December 15, 2024

One amazing attribute of great art is how it can be twisted and bent into new shapes without losing its original power. Emma Woodhouse arrived in this world over two hundred years ago, the rather unheroic heroine of a beloved Jane Austen novel. In the intervening centuries Emma has been translated, staged, and filmed in marvelous adaptations. Remember Clueless? Nothing more than Emma, updated and reset—as if—in Southern California.

Actors’ Shakespeare Project is a production of EMMA serves up playwright Kate Hamill’s 21^st century take on this Regency-era satire. Wed ASP’s craft with Ms. Hamill’s versatility with Jane Austen’s sensibility, and the result is simply: wonderful!

Backstory. A few months ago I enjoyed dinner with delightful friend and theatrical virtuoso, Regine Vital, who told me she was directing this production. Regine also confided that she’d never been much of an Emma fan; rather Persuasion was her preferred Austen novel. I’ve always been a garden-variety Austen fan, which is to say, I know Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice but never dipped into deeper (later) works. Given the luxury of advance notice, I got myself a ticket to EMMA, and was able to read both Persuasion and Emma before the performance. I can now proclaim that Emma is my favorite of Jane Austen’s novels. The plot more intricate than her earlier works, the satire less obvious but equally biting, the story more connected to the world beyond its provincial setting.

But how does Emma hold up as a piece of contemporary theater? Very well. Ms. Hamill condenses the plot in appropriate ways, even as she expands the characters to conjure convincing 2024 selves. She correctly stresses farce over verisimilitude and doesn’t forget for a moment that the audience is sitting right there: Emma direct addresses us so often, we’re essentially the ninth cast member. Meanwhile, Director Vital’s staging betrays her own Shakespearean training. The acting is broad, the actions enthusiastic, the overall energy effervescent. The production sizzles with the over-the-top effort required to make an Elizabethan (or Regency) audience understand what’s going on without benefit of amplification and raked seating. And folks…it is funny!

EMMA at ASP must close on December 15 – dash over to the Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center and see it this weekend. But if you miss this production, rest assured that Emma will come back around, in some from or other, over the next years and decades. The story is simply too human and too funny; the heroine simply too flawed and too true, not to resonate forever.