Resplendent silk and burnished wood. Frothy quips and impossible curls. Plus, there’s all of that push-me, pull-you of sense and sensibility that dogs the dowry-meager Dashwood sisters as they find out what love has to do with it all.
There’s nothing quite like tucking into Jane Austen’s delightfully immersive world on a cold winter eve, rich as it is in creature comforts and human foibles. Anyone who indulges in the English novelist’s single-minded, self-possessed female characters — and the men who distract or disarm them — quickly gets why her works please crowds two centuries on.
In a single interlude, we can marvel at how much and how little has changed in the world, particularly when it comes to matters of the heart, the pursestrings and societal pecking order.
So it goes with playwright Kate Hamill’s deft and at times unexpected stage adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, which is as blithely endowed in its smarts and style as the genuine article on which it is based. Hamill’s work, which premiered in 2014 at New York City’s Bedlam Theater Company, is now treated to a fetching new production by Charleston Stage. Directed by Marybeth Clark, it runs at the Dock Street Theatre through Feb. 8.
This is on the heels of much ado about Austen last year, as 2025 marked the 250th anniversary of the revered novelist’s birth, an occasion toasted with worldwide events (including programming at the Dock Street Theatre via the Charleston Literary Festival and its party boasting a swell of gents decked out as Mr. Darcy of Pride and Prejudice). In the age of Instagram, Jane Austen is trending.
And it’s fitting, too, that we’re harking back to her day with our own American 250th ramping up, given this country’s throughline to the British mores that shaped the ways of the founding fathers, and moved many to break with them. By the time sisters Marianne and Elinor Dashwood of Sense and Sensibility graced the page, it was 1811, deep in the British Regency era. Still, Charleston continued to take its cues from across the pond, importing its styles and ways.
But on with this show. There is always a wink in Austen’s work, a precision marbled-paper cut at the silliness of high society, a sly side eye at its transactional underpinnings and a genial shrug at the triumphant tug of romantic love. While chronicling the often muslin-padded where her heroines are confined, the writer graciously offers us a conspiratorial chuckle, too.
Hamill’s adaptation lends a contemporary edge, one that brings further home the relevance of the work. My own social media are filled with Dashwoodesque Charleston influencers, decked out in fine cotton splendor, perched in photo-styled Lowcountry tableaux that scream, “Yes, I married well.”
At Charleston Stage, Cody Tellis Rutledge’s smartly simple, eye-pleasing set does this same, styled with a painterly pastoral backdrop and cascading flowers. On it, the ensemble dashes about in their eye-catching finery dreamed up by costume designer Kestrel Jurkiewicz-Miles. It all offers plenty of i-Phone candy.
In the work, Hamill has devised a nattering, quirky Greek chorus of performers dubbed the Gossips, who represent the ever-present, less-than-charitable gaze of society. This gaggle breaks contemporary, lending a modern-day veneer to British countryside, and having a grand time spilling the tea. It’s true, some eclipse others in their clusters, but together they make their presence known. Each also inhabits other characters. But for the sisters, the majority of the 11-person ensemble is in a perennial state of juggling roles, adding antic froth.
About those sisters. As Marianne, Alexa Niles is the hot-and-bothered mess one would expect from a woman feeling all the feels through life. In other words, she’s the sensibility of the sister act. Abigail Vernon, on the hand, plays it arrow-straight as Elinor, portraying the pragmatist with dead-on earnestness.
The two are shored up by a rogue’s gallery of marital prospects: Tre Butcher as the beguiling Edward Freers; Daniel Porea Jr. as raffish John Willoughby; Joey Negrete’s true-blue Colonel Brandon. The Dashwood clan connected with the sisters lends verve as well — the stressed-out Mrs. Dashwood (Kristen Therese Chua); the self-interested heiress-by-marriage Fanny (Kailei Hinton); the irrepressible young Margaret (Kelsie Engen).
To make sense of sensibility at the core of Austen’s work–the twists of plot and trails of broken hearts–the author might suggest that you simply follow the money, and see how it compromises some while coaxing out the character of others.
As the Dashwoods reach against societal odds for happiness, one thing that is clear. The manicured colonial edge dividing the haves and the have-nots in many ways prevails, and an evening immersed in Austen’s wry, knowing beat on it might be just the ticket.
IF YOU WANT TO GO: Charleston Stage’s Sense and Sensibility. Feb. 5-8. Various times. Tickets start at $60. charlestonstage.com
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