THEATRE REVIEW

MAY 2025 | Volume 251

 

English playwright Laura Wade has taken Jane Austen’s unfinished novel, The Watsons, and turned it into a play about … well … Austen’s unfinished characters and Wade’s own struggles with how and whether to shape them into a finished story. I say “whether” because the second act of Wade’s play is an extended debate between a character named Laura, trying to finish Austen’s story in theatrical form, and Austen’s characters, who would prefer to shape their own stories and leave at least some of them unfinished.

Joan Bryans’ ambitious Vital Spark Theatre production, the North American premiere of Wade’s play, makes delightful ironic hay of the Austen conundrum and the philosophical issues that arise from the Pirandellian debate between the playwright and Austen’s 16 characters, despite Wade’s tarrying a little too long wrapping up the play.

The Watsons will be familiar to anyone who has ever read Austen. The Watson sisters, Elizabeth (Hannah Everett), Margaret (Jessica O’Gorman), and Emma (Bracha Burke)—the strongest and most independent of them—are impoverished, parentless women of good breeding who must be in want of a husband. The most obvious candidates include dim, nervous, rich Lord Osborne (Samuel Walmsley-Byrne), handsome “cad” Tom Musgrave (Andy Oshima), and local clergyman Mr. Howard (Matt Loop). 

After a good deal of dallying, Lord Osborne proposes to Emma, only to have a maid, who reveals herself as contemporary playwright Laura (Claire deBruyn), intervene and explain the situation to Emma – that Emma is only one of many characters in a world created by a dead novelist, and Laura intends to shape their destiny according to what she thinks Austen would have wanted. Soon all the characters share in this knowledge and some rebel in the name of freedom and self-determination.

Much wit is traded along the way, as well as philosophical wisdom (Hobbes, Rousseau, Locke, Wollstonecraft), all in good fun. Things take their course and matches are made, including an unlikely union between Lady Osborne (Rebecca Walters) and the maid Nanny (Liz Connors), who insists, “I won’t be fetishized.”

Kudos to Bryans, who mounts her Vital Spark shows on a shoestring and always gets good work from her large casts. Credit her designers’ work, too: R. Todd Parker’s simple, functional set, Catherine E. Carr’s (mostly) period costumes, Jack Mosher’s lighting, Pat Unruh’s music, and Danica Kobayashi’s wacky choreography as the characters dance their freedom into the night.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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