DULUTH — Denfeld High School had "Zombies from the Beyond" last month, and the University of Wisconsin-Superior has "She Kills Monsters" coming up. The University of Minnesota Duluth theater program will also see its share of action, even though the next show going up at the Dudley Experimental Theatre is a Jane Austen adaptation.
"Could we dial up the threat?" director Jenna Soleo-Shanks asked Kylee Paar. "Can you attack her?"
Jed Carlson / Duluth Media Group
Paar took the suggestion, stepping boldly toward fellow actor Courtney Larson and grasping Larson's hands with zeal. "I'm not mistaken about the name of the man on whom all my happiness depends," said Paar, leaning in as Lucy Steele. "Mr. Edward Ferrars!"
The revelation comes as a blow to Larson's character Elinor Dashwood, who harbors feelings for Edward herself. UMD's production is faithful to the 1811 novel "Sense and Sensibility," but its script was written by Kate Hamill, a playwright whose work over the past decade has brought new life to the work of Jane Austen and other classic authors.
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"Even though it is a period piece, it feels very fresh," Soleo-Shanks said in an interview before one of last week's rehearsals. "Whatever the actors do is really in conversation with the audience."
Hamill, an actor herself, strips away some of the trappings associated with this material — elaborate sets, restrained movement — and lets things get a little rowdy. The effect is to make stories set long ago accessible to 21st-century audiences and to empower theater artists to leverage the live setting.
"We start from the first moment, acknowledging them and winking at them," said Soleo-Shanks about the audience. "I say to the actors all the time, 'As gossips, the whole audience gossips with you.'"
Jed Carlson / Duluth Media Group
Rehearsing the play's opening scene last week, a group of actors burst onto the stage and split up to begin directly addressing groups of imagined audience members, establishing a playfully conspiratorial sense of social stakes.
"It just feels like the audience is a scene partner," said actor Figensia Alcenat, sitting among a group of actors in the Marshall Performing Arts Center lobby before rehearsal. "Once we get an audience, it's going to be so fun."
"It stays true to Jane Austen's humor and the way that she crafts her characters, but it's modern and very fast-paced," said actor Zsofi Eastvold. "The story does not drag."
Duluth audiences will have opportunities this season to see Hamill's adaptations of both of Austen's most-read novels: in February, the newly minted Zeitgeist Theater Company will stage Hamill's "Pride and Prejudice" as its debut production.
"I have never touched Jane Austen, or breathed near Jane Austen," said actor Luke Hiland, "but I am familiar with Kate Hamill's adaptations of Jane Austen, and I think that they're a really great way of getting modern audiences into Jane Austen."
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"I wasn't necessarily a fan of Jane Austen before, but I certainly am now," said Soleo-Shanks, a member of UMD's theater faculty. "I feel like her characters are immediate. They live in front of me, and I think that's what theater, as an embodied art form, does. It literally brings the character to life in front of your eyes."
"It's been such a pleasure to lift up that fourth wall because you don't get to do it in a lot of shows," said actor Aaron Dumalag, using the theatrical term for the imaginary "fourth wall" between the actors and audience.
"Our department is like a laboratory," said Soleo-Shanks. "We're applying the knowledge, we're doing an experiment."
Contributed / Derek Montgomery
Students also make up nearly the entire design team for the show. "Our costumes, our set, our hair and makeup, the stage management team, the dramaturgy team," listed Soleo-Shanks, "they're all students."
"Sense and Sensibility" is part of UMD's mainstage season, which sees work presented both on the principal Marshall stage and in the Dudley Experimental Theatre. The season also includes a series of performances in the LAB Series, which features original student work in a lower-pressure setting designed to build on the creativity that faculty observed during pandemic lockdowns.
Jed Carlson / Duluth Media Group
"We had to rewrite what theater was," said Soleo-Shanks. "That was showing us as faculty how much our students could surprise us and how they were thriving even with all of the complications and difficulties that engendered. It reminded us that theater is about taking risks, so we thought about how we could keep that going."
It may not be as inherently risky to stage a script that's met success around the world since its premiere Off-Broadway in 2014, but Hamill's outward-facing adaptation encourages actors to put themselves out there and try for audience engagement.
Jed Carlson / Duluth Media Group
"If they laugh, if they don't laugh, it changes everything," said Soleo-Shanks about the audience.
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"It's kind of rejuvenating, in that the audience gives so much back to you that you give to them," said Hiland. "It keeps the show afloat and moving and alive, all the way through."
While the arts center was largely populated with theater students last week, that will change when "Sense and Sensibility" opens Friday.
"It brings the community together," said Alcenat about stage performance at UMD. "I see people that we wouldn't see typically. They're not theater nerds."
"As a student, I'm immersed in people that are in a similar walk of life, that are our age, doing the same thing," said Eastvold. "The cool part with theater is that you get there and it's people that under other circumstances, you would probably never be sharing an experience in the same room, in the same place together. For a little bit, we get to create this connection."
Jed Carlson / Duluth Media Group
"Part of loving the art like we all do is the fact that we get to change people's lives in maybe a small way, or a very drastic way," said Dumalag. "I don't know where those people (in the audience) have been before they got to the theater that day, but I know I can give them something to hold on to ... It feels like I'm able to not just share that with the UMD community, but share that with Duluth as a whole."
"Sense and Sensibility" runs from Nov. 3-11. For information and tickets, see tickets.umn.edu.
This column was updated at 10:08 a.m. Nov. 2 to correct the name of "Sense and Sensibility" in a photo caption and twice in the story. This column was also updated at 8:50 a.m. Nov. 2 to correct the spelling of an actor's name in two photo captions. It was originally published at 8 a.m. Nov. 2. The News Tribune regrets the errors.
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