All About Austen, Abridged

It takes a lot to coax theater veteran Robert Kelley to head five hours south from his Bay Area home. After all, it’s been five years since he retired as the artistic director of TheatreWorks Silicon Valley (TSV), that retirement preceded a year earlier by his company (founded in far-off 1970) winning a coveted Regional Theater Tony Award. But the draw was two-fold: re-teaming with Scott DeVine, Ensemble Theatre’s executive artistic director (and TSV’s onetime CFO and later GM), and the opportunity to sink his teeth, figuratively speaking, into Jane Austen – the author’s 250th birthday later this month occasioning the West Coast premiere of The Complete Works of Jane Austen, Abridged. 

“Austen’s writing is always brilliant and astonishing for her era, treating women as real people who are very complicated and funny and intriguing co-equals with the men in an era that did not respect women in that way,” Kelley said. “And they are not just surviving but going far beyond the expectations of a rigid society. Her books are funny and romantic. I’m no expert, but to me she invented the romantic comedy, at least as we know it today.”

As a fan, Kelley has helmed five previous Jane Austen stage productions, including the world premieres of the Paul Gordon musicals Pride and Prejudice and Emma, and the first reading of Lauren Gunderson’s Christmas at Pemberley, all of which played under Ensemble’s proscenium prior to DeVine’s tenure. But Austen, Abridged is an entirely different animal. 

“It’s an utterly amazing attempt to summarize all of her work in one show with a lot of different takes on the different books and a huge amount of fun,” Kelley said. “It’s satirical, but also loving. I think of it as a love letter to Jane Austen, but also a fairly wacky one.” 

That’s because the wit, romance, and before-its-time take on gender equality finds itself in an almost madcap setting that could be seen as meta in a number of ways. The story finds three women who are ardent advocates of Austen putting on the play, but when one drops out, they have to school her male replacement on the Austen oeuvre – which also helps inform the more casual Austen fan in the audience. Pulling the focus back even further, the four female playwrights of Austen, Abridged in fact partially wrote the piece for themselves. 

“They were actresses who love Jane Austen, which prompted them to create this piece,” Kelley explained. “Two of them starred in the advance, for-sale of productions.”

ETC has reached deep into SoCal’s theatrical talent pool to cast their production, which runs December 6-21, with a special added performance on Austen’s actual birthday, December 16. The trio – Alyssa Anne Austin, Kyle T. Hester, and Kirsten Høj – the latter of whom earned her B.F.A. in Acting at UCSB – portray more than 10 characters apiece, sometimes even simultaneously in a scene, with only a few props, hats, and other quick costume swaps to change between them. In a non-stop 90 minutes on stage, the show manages to excerpt or cite nine different novels, touching on the razor-sharp wit, society skewering and romantic moments, shifting styles and stories with spectacular speed and much behind-the-scenes action.

“It’s a hefty task to basically give you an overview of Austen’s six prominent novels and three of her earlier works written when she was a teenager in just an hour and a half,” Kelley said. “But we’re using creative staging and multimedia elements – including involving the audience – to surprise even an Austen expert and expose those who aren’t familiar with Austen alike. There’s a lot going on all the time – the characters going back and forth between themselves and acting in the play – that keep the fires burning.”