Pride and prejudice in the American heartland
A Missouri-grown folk musical gender-swaps Jane Austen's most famous enemies-to-lovers story and sets it in a divided America. Now it's arrived in the big city.
A grassroots folk musical retelling of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice that sets this enemies-to-lovers feminist literary classic from the long 18th century on a Tennessee farm is not what I - or possibly anyone else - was looking for.
But that’s what I found on a recent Saturday afternoon in a Kansas City arthouse theater, a hundred miles from where I live down Highway 70. The production Prejudice and Pride was wrapping up its last weekend of performances in Missouri before heading to New York City for an Off-Broadway run that just opened.
The musical, a collaboration between producer/songwriter Sam Wright and producer/director Nicholas Collett, not only sets this iconic 19th century novel on a contemporary American farm bringing in themes of rural-urban and ideological divides, but as if that’s not enough it also gender-swaps the whole thing, making the Bennet family of five sisters threatened by displacement from their family estate instead the Longbourn brothers threatened by the loss of their family farm. Our Elizabeth Bennet is now Bennett Longbourn, a denim-wearing, banjo-playing brother being pressured by his father to marry “a pretty little goldmine” since - what with the costs of food, healthcare, and the exporting of jobs overseas - that might be the easiest way to save the farm.
Bennett is talented and cute - so how hard could this be?
Enter Darcy, a rich girl from, you guessed it, New York City.
When she enters the local bar - “Hoedown Jane’s” - she appears, well, a little snooty. We’re not surprised, and Bennett is not impressed.
But Darcy’s friend, “Bing” - who’s just bought a neighboring ranch - is definitely falling for Jake, our stand-in for Jane, Bennet.
And we’re off!
This might sound a little hokey to people not from these parts, I realize.
But it’s difficult to convey just how much fun it is to watch Austen’s classic enemies-to-lovers story played out on a stage with bluegrass and country jams and banjos and bass guitars exploding all over those classic dramas of land, family, division, money, and, ultimately, love.
[I]t’s difficult to convey just how much fun it is to watch Austen’s classic enemies-to-lovers story played out on a stage with bluegrass and country jams and banjos and bass guitars exploding all over those classic dramas of land, family, division, money, and, ultimately, love.
But from the very first few lines picked out on the banjo, the transfer of Austen’s themes to country songs - with lyrics about striving, about hope, about despair, and with lots and lots of humor and silliness thrown in - just makes so much sense. And it’s an awful lot of fun.
Musician Sam Wright, who also plays Bennett, and director Nicholas Collett both agreed to meet with me just before their last Saturday matinee performance in Kansas City, to chat. I brought a fancy microphone and lots of questions!
The pair have co-produced together before, and are part of an international group of fringe theater collaborators across London and southern England, Kansas City, Adelaide, Australia, and beyond - often co-creating productions that end up on Edinburgh’s highly influential fringe festival and Off-Broadway. This production - Prejudice and Pride - won a Best of Fringe award at the Edinburgh festival last year.
The idea of putting Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to country music for a folk musical on the stage was the idea of Nicholas Collett’s wife, Lorraine. The family reads a lot of Austen - and when the idea was brought up with Sam Wright during one of his visits to England, Wright seemed to immediately love the idea.
“Many reviewers have said that this idea shouldn't work but somehow it does,” laughs Wright when I catch up with him in KC. “Obviously it’s fun to take a fish out of its water. To take a comedy of manners like Pride and Prejudice and put it in a rustic setting. But the American South is still very much about politeness and form and those kinds of manners. So it translated really well to current American culture.”
More importantly the story - especially the enemies-to-lovers story - can actually help with what Wright and others call radical empathy: Understanding the other point of view - whether it’s country folks listening to the perspective of big-city types, or it’s people who identify as men listening to people who identify as women, or whether it’s people on one political aisle listening to those across the other aisle.
“When I looked at the story,” says Wright, “I realized that it’s fundamentally about people who have a bad first impression of each other, and seem to disagree on a lot of topics, and then they somehow work through that and come to actually respect and love each other. And I thought, ‘Wow, that is the story that we need to tell right now.’ So it was as things began developing in American culture, that we went, ‘OK, this is important. … And I think that’s why so many people are returning to the story of Pride and Prejudice in this particular moment.”
“When I looked at the story,” says Wright, “I realized that it’s fundamentally about people who have a bad first impression of each other, and seem to disagree on a lot of topics, and then they somehow work through that and come to actually respect and love each other. And I thought, ‘Wow, that is the story that we need to tell right now.’ So it was as things began developing in American culture, that we went, ‘OK, this is important. … And I think that’s why so many people are returning to the story of Pride and Prejudice in this particular moment.”
Nicholas Collett agrees that the production is about “opening a dialogue,” and he bravely engages in post-show mingling and talking with audience members, whether in Kansas City or Edinburgh. He says he’s learned from Austen fans that twisting Austen’s narrative every which way actually seems to magnify it - and he was pleased to find at the run of the show in Edinburgh that American audience members seemed to be among the most excited to see their political divisions put on the stage and put to banjo music.
“Obviously the British class system is reflected all the way through that novel,” says Collett. “And the way that we’ve been able to reflect it is also through land and money, and those are the kind of common currencies that exist both in the UK and the USA. So like Sam says, on paper it shouldn’t work. But it really does.”
Bennet and Darcy argue with each other, glare at each other, dance with each other, and finally fall in love with each other all while wielding a banjo (Bennett) and guitar (Darcy).
And a couple of the songs will just get to you: The gorgeous “Eastward Facing Road” contemplates, at a key moment in the story, looking past one’s horizons, one’s prejudices, and looking toward the views and the landscape of others, through love.
“Turning ashes into feathers,” the lyrics say, through heavenly harmonies, “making wings materialize. Hope will set your house on fire. It will guide you by the light.”
Hope! Yes, we’re hear for it, Bennett.
But my absolute song-obsession from the production is the number “Born with a Broken Heart.” It’s a near- final duet between rich-girl Darcy and farm-boy Bennett, as they finally begin to come together and share their points of view.
Surprisingly, this kind of post-game analysis is straight from Austen, who, it’s so easy to forget, spends some time in the text having characters like Elizabeth and Darcy come together after all of the conflagrations to analyze their miscommunications, their upbringings, its failings, and how it’s impacted and “prejudiced” them in the preceding pages.
Similarly in this song, Darcy and Bennett come together bringing their memories, their banjo, their guitar, their harmonies, as Darcy sings, “My father wrote love songs and left them for me to understand,” and Bennett laments: “The truth is I was comfortable with discontentment.”
And they find that they can agree on one thing: “So what if I’m born with a broken heart.”
To me, this song contemplates the pain that can actually come with good love when one has become so used to the not-good kind. And how opening up to good love can be so scary, uncomfortable, and painful.
Wright says he wrote most of the songs on his banjo during the pandemic and played them over Zoom with Collett - and when I asked him about the depth of the lyrics in “Born with a Broken Heart,” he nodded, saying that the song came after therapy, and was actually originally written as a proposal to his partner, Danielle, who is now his wife.
He says he realized that as much as he loved the song, it wasn’t very good as a proposal (failed proposals are also right out of Austen) so he wrote another, happier one. (The proposal was successful - the pair are married and Danielle is involved in the production.)
But it took one of my smart public-radio colleagues who worked with me on this audio version of the story for NPR-affiliate KBIA Radio to point out that this kind of painful coming together, turning discontentment into healing, can also apply to our divided America. That’s what Wright is hoping people will discover in the love story of Darcy and Bennett.
My favorite part of the musical arrives in a single glimpse - a moment, during a near-final musical number, when the character of Jake appears on stage briefly. Jake is eager, optimistic, but also intelligent and hopeful, just like our favorite literary sister, Jane Bennet.
In the scene, Jake appears onstage having just arrived from the farm in the big metropolis of New York City to find “Bing” and find romance. He holds his phone as a map in front of him and wears an “I love NYC” hat.
Something about that hat. Something about a farm kid going to NYC to find love, looking for direction, his face full of optimism and promise, made me feel something that I couldn’t quite place.
Was it a kind of joy?
It was only later as I continued to listen to the soundtrack that I realized what the image of Jake and his hat was giving me - in a time division and disparities, this simple glimpse of a kid in the big city moving past his horizons and shouldering the discomfort of love, was giving me a sensation that felt an awful lot like hope.
You can learn more about the folk-musical retelling Prejudice and Pride and its just-arrived Off-Broadway run here. And you can see lots of cast videos and backstage shenanegans at the production’s Facebook page here. Jane Austen fans will be intrigued to know that Jane Austen’s most notorious villain, Mr. Wickham, in this production becomes a military gal named Wick Hamm, and that our favorite best-friend from Pride and Prejudice, Charlotte Lucas, becomes the sweet and long-suffering Luke Charlton.
If you get a chance to see this production, let us know about your experience!
Janet Saidi writes The Austen Connection as , exploring how the works of Jane Austen connect with us today and connect us with each other.
Janet, What a marvelous essay that takes us not only from the Midwest to Off Broadway, from the printed page to the banjo and guitar but also from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice to relevance in politics today and ultimately proves the lasting force of Austen. ~Mary
Thanks for this! I just bought two tickets, second row, next Saturday. Can’t wait!