Guest Writer Karen Eterovich: From Novel to Play to Zoom – Happy Birthday Auntie Jane!

I am delighted to be a guest blogger for Amy Smith. Our story goes back to 2005 when we met via email through Dr. Cheryl Wanko. Amy offered to be my dramaturg and offered me a workshop to create a solo play with Jane Austen as the main character. I wrote and then performed “Cheer from Chawton, A Jane Austen Family Theatrical” for the very first time at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, CA. Now sixteen years and more than fifty performances later, I can say that Jane Austen is a character I still hold near and dear.

At the time, the particular challenge of the play was to find a way that the usually shy authoress might meet with an audience. But this flow between the genre of the novel and the genre of the play was surprisingly easy. Not that Jane was ever a scandalous actor but that she loved the theatre.

Besides the lengthy and utterly enjoyable play-acting scenes in Mansfield Park, there’s a wonderful book I used in my research, called Jane Austen and the Theatre by Paula Byrne. Locating Jane in a realistic place, it made sense to set my play at Chawton Great House on the eve of Jane’s Birthday and the publication of Emma. It is written that Jane Austen was a superior writer of dialogue and so her dialogue made an easy transition to the stage with only some judicious cutting. Other than context, there were no new words to write. Austen’s intellect and wit prevailed every time.

I admit crafting a solo show that engages people in the twenty-first century is no easy task. We compete with social media, computers, cell phones, and students’ short attention spans. How to engage? Even amateur theatricals in Austen’s time did not break the third wall except in asides. But I decided to transgress further and bring audience members on stage. Some are briefed beforehand; some are surprised in real time during the performance. Because the audience is Jane’s family, they are included in their favorite bits from the novels and the letters. The solo play format flowed easily into an audience participation format.

With the advent of COVID, performing a solo audience participation piece was, well, you can understand, out of the question. In 2020, I was in New York City performing “Cheer from Chawton” in a Women’s History Month Series at the 14th Street Y, and when Broadway shut down, we shut down. We actors went home to isolate. But even at home, “art will out” and many of us started reading plays and performing on Zoom.

I found I enjoy acting and directing on Zoom. One of my favorite projects of 2021 was adapting and directing Fanny Burney’s The Witlings as a two-part Zoom mini-series. Here again, I could not be faithful to the theatrical genre because we were on Zoom. Everyone is in close up. But Burney wrote asides for all her characters, even the maid! I exploited that and the asides are all intimate close ups with each character. I was also able to cast actors from England and all over the United States and we performed a play that might not otherwise be produced unless a company like the Shakespeare Theatre decided to produce it. We received a review in the midst of lockdown by Dr. Katie Aske: The Witlings, a TV Mini-Series in Two Parts - BSECS

When Amy mentioned the theme of “Genre Fluid Versus Genre Faithful” I have found that the theatrical interpretation of Jane Austen can really do both. Her letters indicate she must have read her words aloud to Cassandra and other family members. The speeches in the novels are so perfectly written that they seem meant for performance. I tell people when you memorize Austen’s words you realize her brilliance and wit profoundly.

And Fanny Burney actually wrote for the theatre, so the transgression was converting her to Zoom. Of course, physical humor is lost on the small screen and things can go wrong, just like on stage. But I got a satisfactory cutting of this play, and my actors had a chance to exercise their intellects and chops on a classic piece. When I think about theatre as we know it today, most practitioners are used to flowing between many genres. I would like to cite all the novels that have jumped from page to stage to screen and plays that are devised like Metamorphoses by director Mary Zimmerman and many others.

Looking overall, I would argue the arts have always been fluid because they must suit a timely purpose. We may want to re-read Jane Austen, but every generation has a new version of Pride and Prejudice to watch either on stage, the small screen, or in the movie theatre. Fluidity is always a part of the dialogue for an art practitioner, and even scholars have embraced the idea of fluidity and not stayed faithful to a work of fiction because they must find modern ways to communicate material that excites them.

Happy Christmas everybody!

Karen Eterovich may be found on Instagram as @eterovichdaughter, on Twitter as @lovearmd and on Facebook as @lovearmd.

Check back in the New Year for guest posts by Michael David Lukas, Susanna Craig, and more!