Director

SET Designer

Costume Designer

Lighting Designer

Sound Designer

Dialect Coach

Dance Consultant

Production Stage Manager

Nisi Sturgis*

Brittany Vasta

Sophie S. Schneider

Anthony Galaska

Liam Bellman-Sharpe

Julie Foh

Kimiye Corwin

Mary Garrigan*

Photos by Sydney Fucito

Margaret Dashwood / Lucy Steele

Mrs. Dashwood / Mrs. Palmer / Miss Grey

Willoughby

Edward Ferrars / Mr. Palmer / Robert Ferrars

Colonel Brandon

Elinor Dashwood

Sir John / Mr. Dashwood / Thomas / Mr. Perks / Doctor

Billie Wyatt*

Terra Chaney

Lynette R. Freeman*

Christian Frost*

Patrick Andrew Jones*

Sean Mahan*

Mandi Masden*

Patrick Toon*

Marianne Dashwood

I sent Liam this tune that my son, Owen improvised on piano in actor housing in Peterborough New Hampshire

the same day he sent back this beautiful early sketch which became the Sense and Sensibility Theme

Director’s Notes

Hello again!

It’s been almost a decade since I’ve had the pleasure of sharing time and stories with you all here in the Kirby Theatre.

So much has happened. I hope you’ve fared well through the ups and downs.

I’m grateful and so moved to be back in Madison. I’ve made lifelong friendships because of this theatre, grown as an artist here, fell in love here, I even got engaged on this very stage! Our son turned 10 years old during rehearsals of this show. Artists are wanderers and the ground is ever-shifting beneath their feet. For me, the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey has been an artistic home where family - creative and personal - converge.

The story of the Dashwoods, the family you are about to meet, is a convergence of the creative and personal for its author, Jane Austen. Jane’s family struggled with money and status. She had a sister, Cassandra, whom she cherished, trusted, admired. They both grew up in a world in which marriage determined so much of a woman’s merit and prosperity and she acknowledged and contended with the unequal pressures and expectations placed on women.  Jane wrote letters to her sister about the concerns of daily life, her societal frustrations, and incisive, wry, piercing studies of her friends and acquaintances. Years later, Cassandra destroyed many of these letters to preserve Jane’s privacy and reputation.

In 1795, at 19 years old, Jane began writing a story about two sisters in epistolary form - a novel-in-letters - entitled Elinor and Marianne. She found a satisfying, socially palatable home for her acerbic wit and nascent feminism in a fictionalized context drawn from her personal experience. Six years later, Jane looked back at these letters and reworked them, establishing in her writing voice a wonderful coincidence of youth and maturity, impetuosity and restraint that resonated throughout her career. Jane adapted her story of these sisters into a narrative structure that became her first published novel: Sense and Sensibility.

A friend asked me why - why are we still revisiting Jane Austen? Her world is so specific to a time and place, it feels like it should seem remote and distant to us now. And yet we keep coming back. The critical and commercial success of all the film and television adaptations of Jane Austen’s novels testifies to her persistent appeal. The social rules and restrictions specific to Jane Austen’s time are immediately recognizable and can be transplanted into many contexts - from a California high school in Clueless to a Bollywood-style interracial romance in Bride and Prejudice. 

Jane Austen’s voice has an unmistakeable timelessness. She has echoes of the impulsive, opinionated teen tempered with years of observation and experience to reveal a rational, practical, earned wisdom. Her romances are maddening, delicious, beautiful, and heartbreaking, but they do not supersede the love of family. She has real affection for her characters, who are as fallible as they are dazzling. They’re judgmental, vain, noble, embarrassed by their elders, worried about their children, they flirt and fall in and out of love, they struggle to communicate, and sometimes say the exactly thing we wish we could say.

Mostly, I think, we return to Jane Austen again and again because we know that our perceptions about each other will always be, to some extent, wrong. Jane presents the value of ultimately extending grace towards others and allowing our perceptions to change, and she shows us how that thorny process can lead us to a deeper knowledge of ourselves. 

That is certainly true with this story. Jane Austen thrusts the Dashwood women into each other’s care as the ground shifts beneath them. She introduces us to the sisters Elinor and Marianne, so different from and so bound to one another, and challenges them to rebuild and reevaluate their understanding of home. In the face of extremity, adversity and imbalance, may they - may we - find a way to wander delightfully through the world with sense, and with sensibility.

Love & Art!

~ Nisi Sturgis