Opening Tonight: CHRISTMAS AT PEMBERLEY at the Station Theatre

Last month, The New Yorker called Lauren Gunderson the most popular playwright you've never heard of. With an Steinberg/ATCA Award for I and You, the 2016 Lanford Wilson Award from the Dramatists Guild and the 2016 Otis Gurnsey Award, and nominations for the Susan Smith Blackburn and John Gassner Awards, Gunderson has emerged as a major force in American theater, so major that American Theatre recognized her as the most-produced playwright in the United States this year, ahead of people like Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and August Wilson.

A big part of Gunderson's popularity this year is Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley, which she co-wrote with her friend Margot Melcon. This look at Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice characters and how they might spend their holidays has struck a chord with theaters looking for a warm and witty option for their December schedules.

Urbana's Station Theatre will open their production of Christmas at Pemberley tonight, with performances running through December 16. As they put it, "As the holidays approach, revisit your favorite Pride and Prejudice characters as they gather at Pemberley, the home of Mr. and Mrs. Darcy. Middle sister Mary Bennet has come into her own as a confident woman full of curiosity and wit. But will her story end happily ever after? A true holiday delight, full of wit, warmth, and romance."

Joi Hoffsommer directs this Christmas at Pemberley, with a cast that includes Dominique Allen as Mary Bennet, Tyler Cook as Charles Bingley, Ashton Goodly as Arthur de Bourgh, Jenna Kohn as Lydia Wickham, Misty Martin as Anne de Bourgh, Aaron Miller as Fitzwilliam Darcy, Celia Mueller as Elizabeth Darcy, and Uche Nwansi as Jane Bingley.

You can make a reservation at the Station site or by calling 217-384-4000. Performances begin at 8 pm on weeknights and Saturdays from December 7 to 9 and 13 to 16, with a 3 pm matinee on Sunday the 10th.

The Station Theatre Serves Up Silence, Science and Lauren Gunderson for 17-18

The Station Theatre in Urbana

The Station Theatre is usually the last to announce its fall season. Artistic Director Rick Orr is wont to make the big announcement at the company party that marks the end of summer, meaning fall shows are just around the corner when he spills their details.

Lauren Gunderson

Last year, the Station made the unusual choice (for the Station, anyway) of including two plays by the same playwright in the same season. For 2016-17, the playwright in the spotlight was Conor McPherson, represented by The Night Alive in October and The Birds in November. For 2017-18, Lauren Gunderson, Manhattan Theatre Club playwright-in-residence, is the one who gets special attention, with her take on Jane Austen in Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley as a holiday offering in December 2017 and Silent Sky, the true story of early 20th century astronomer Henrietta Leavitt, in February 2018. You'll notice that both works are not only written by a woman (Gunderson) but inspired by work of famous women (Austen and Leavitt) and they feature women characters front and center (Mary Bennet, the fictional middle sister in Austen's Pride and Prejudice, and the historical character of astronomer Leavitt). And they'll be directed by women, with Joi Hoffsommer at the helm of Miss Bennet and Katie Burke taking on Silent Sky. Bravo, Station!

There's more good news in the rest of the season, too, with lots of provocative and interesting choices that represent something a little different. Here's the full scoop on what you'll see at the Station Theatre in 2017-18:

October brings Will Eno's Title and Deed, directed by Deb Richardson. Eno has emerged as a major voice in American theater since Thom Paine (based on nothing) in 2005, for which he was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. He followed that up with the Horton Foote Award for Most Promising New American Play for Middletown in 2010. When Title and Deed played at New York's Signature Theater in 2012, Charles Isherwood called the play "gorgeously and inventively wrought, line by line." In that production, Irish actor Conor Lovett was the solo actor on stage, "recounting his past in another country and his present in a strange new one" in a meditation on roots and rootlesness, hope and hopelessness, and how we've all created and used language to try to give meaning to life. Lovett was directed by his wife, Julie Hegarty Lovett, at the Signature, just as the Station's Deb Richardson will direct her husband, David Barkley, for the Station. Title and Deed opens October 5 and continues through the 21st.

Small Mouth Sounds by Bess Wohl is next, directed by Jaclyn Loewenstein in performances November 2 to 18. If a great deal of Title and Deed is about words, Small Mouth Sounds is about the lack of them, as its six characters are attending a retreat where they're not allowed to talk. They may be silent for most of the play's 100 minutes, but they are communicating nonetheless. "Filled with awkward and insightful humor, Small Mouth Sounds is the unique and compassionate new play that asks how we address life’s biggest questions when words fail us."

Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley arrives December 6, in good time for holiday entertainment. Gunderson's play (which usually gives a co-writing credit to former MTC Director of New Play Development Margot Melcon) focuses on bookish middle sister Mary Bennet and what happens to her two years after the "happily ever after" her sister Lizzie got in Pride and Prejudice. Mary and the other Bennets are gathering at Pemberley, the home of Fitzwilliam and Elizabeth Darcy, for Christmas, but often-overlooked Mary, who always has her nose stuck in a book, is not in a romantic frame of mind. Just in time, a suitor arrives -- Arthur de Bourgh -- an Oxford man, someone who is more sure of his intellect more than his heart, just like Mary.

In January, we'll get our first area look at Fun Home, the Tony-winning Broadway musical based on an autobiographical coming-of-age graphic novel by Alison Bechdel. The brilliant (and very, very funny) Lisa Kron wrote the book and lyrics of the musical, while Jeanine Tesori wrote the music. Fun Home won the Best Musical Tony in 2015, along with awards for its score, book, leading actor Michael Cerveris and director Sam Gold. For the Station, Latrelle Bright will direct this "refreshingly honest, wholly original musical about seeing your parents through grown-up eyes" with performances January 18 to February 3, 2018.

Gunderson's Silent Sky follows, opening February 15 and closing March 3, 2018.  "A lovingly crafted period piece that imagines Leavitt’s inner world against the backdrop of World War I, Einstein’s discoveries and the suffragette movement, Silent Sky is an intellectual epic told on an intimate scale. Bottom line: Heavenly," wrote Wendell Brock for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. After Henrietta Leavitt earned a bachelor's degree from Radcliffe College in 1892, she worked without pay as a "computer" at the Harvard College Observatory, studying photographic plates to determine the brightness of stars. Leavitt and the other computers worked with photographic plates rather than telescopes because women weren't allowed to use telescopes at that time. Although she toiled in obscurity and never reached any sort of fame, Leavitt was an important figure in astronomy history. She was "the woman who discovered how to measure the Universe."

Discovery is also at the heart of Cock, a play with a simple title that has engendered quite a bit of controversy. When Mike Bartlett's play -- about a man who thought he was gay but then cheats on his male partner with a woman, throwing into question what he thought he knew about himself -- premiered in London, it was called Cock. When it came to the United States, the New York Times wouldn't print the title, so it became The Cockfight Play. It stayed that way in LA, although Toronto and now Urbana are apparently sophisticated enough for the original Cock. In any event, this "comic discussion of identity and sexuality" will be directed by Rick Orr for the Station, with performances from March 22 to April 7, 2018.

The season will finish up with Tracy Letts' blistery family comedy/drama August: Osage County, which runs from April 26 to May 12, 2018. Mathew Green, who just finished up Jordan Harrison's Marjorie Prime August 12, will be at the helm of Letts' Pulitzer Prize winning play next spring. Although August: Osage County began its life at Steppenwolf in Chicago, its subsequent Broadway production ran for 648 performances and won five Tonys, including Best Play, Best Director (Anna D. Shapiro), Best Actress (Deanna Dunagan), Best Featured Actress (Rondi Reed) and Best Scenic Design (Todd Rosenthal). It may only be ten years old, but it's already a classic.

All in all, the Station is offering a compelling mix of words, wit, silence, science, family and fierce theatrical imagination. For more information, visit the main website here with tabs at the top for individual pages.

Modern Love Is Messy in the Station's "Becky Shaw"

Gina Gionfriddo is another of the rising playwrights with a "Law & Order" connection. Like Theresa Rebeck, one of the most prominent "Law & Order" playwrights, Gionfriddo has also seen her work performed at Actors Theatre of Louisville as part of its Humana Festival of New American Plays.

Gionfriddo's "After Ashley," about a father and son dealing with the fall-out (and the spotlight) that comes after a terrible crime rips apart their family, was a big hit at the 2004 Humana Festival, making Gionfriddo a finalist for the Steinberg/ATCA New Play Award and the John Gassner Memorial Playwriting Award.

After "After Ashley," Gionfriddo made a splash with "Becky Shaw," her second Humana play, in 2008. "Becky Shaw" also got a New York run after its Louisville success, with the lovely Annie Parisse (who has a Law & Order connection of her own) in the title role, and the play made Gionfriddo a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. .

Given that the play is about flawed people in pursuit of love, strained finances, social classes and dubious parenting, the title of "Becky Shaw"  definitely conjures up Becky Sharp (conniving social climber) in Thackeray's "Vanity Fair," with perhaps a little George Bernard Shaw (dryly funny social commentary on the mating game amidst the upper classes) on the side.

Gionfriddo's script is pointed and funny at some turns, murky and a little scary at others, as her plot veers off in unexpected directions and her characters continue to reveal layers we don't necessarily expect. In Kay Bohannon Holley's production for Urbana's Station Theatre, I was especially taken with the blind date scene, after newlyweds Suzanna and Andrew, still in the blissful in-love-with-love stage, fix up her adopted brother, Max, with Andrew's new co-worker, Becky, in what is instantly clear was a very bad idea.

Max is a dark and cynical financial planner who loves nothing more than verbally eviscerating his companions. He depends on his wit and intelligence, as well as the fact that he grew up in Suzanna's patrician Southern household to give him a patina of class, to put others in their place. And his blind date, Becky... Is no match for that at all. She is awkward, a little odd, poor, and working as an office temp. She doesn't have a car. She doesn't have a cell phone. She doesn't know how to dress or what to say or what other people's jokes mean. Becky is just plain wrong.

But Max takes her out, anyway, and they are mugged, setting into motion a series of increasingly complicated events. If at first it seemed that Max could eat Becky for lunch, well, Becky has some weapons of her own. Plus there's the small fact that Max is kind of in love (or as in love as it's possible for him to be) with his adopted sister, Suzanna; that Suzanna's mother, Susan, is difficult and cantankerous, too; that Andrew's savior fixation is also less than healthy; and that Becky's black hole of neediness may just be a big ol' con game. Oops.

Holley's staging gives this "Becky Shaw" a sense of urgency and crisp pace, with good interaction and conflict among all five characters. As Suzanna, the somewhat flighty woman in the middle of all the various relationship combinations and permutations, Lindsey Gates Markel never loses sight of her character's through line, pulling us along as well. Mike Prosise matches her well as Andrew, the teddy bear who just wants everyone to be happy, with Joi Hoffsommer adding an amusingly acerbic note as Susan, the fading aristocrat who keeps a boy toy but won't talk about money over dinner.

If Suzanna is the center of the play's universe, Max and Becky are massive solar flares sending heat and sparks all over everybody else. They're both mercurial, manipulative and verbal, in very different ways, and Mathew Green and Martha A. Mills negotiate that difficult terrain nicely.

Jadon Peck's scenic design is also a big asset to the production, with one higher level stage right for hotel rooms and a series of living rooms center stage on the floor. The triangular backdrops (rotated to change the scene from a small apartment to a crummy place and then a posh home) are particularly effective. The "soundtrack" compiled for the show is also spot-on for modern-day romance angst; it's apparently invited so many comments that the folks at the Station have shared the playlist at Rdio and Spotify.

I can't say I fully understand what Gionfriddo was trying to say with "Becky Shaw," but it is definitely a play you'll be talking about after you see it, as you try to puzzle out for yourself who the real villain is, who's lying when, who feels what about whom and why, and which relationships are worth saving. Very intriguing stuff.

BECKY SHAW
By Gina Gionfriddo

The Celebration Company at the Station Theatre

Director: Kay Bohannon Holley
Producer and Assistant Director: Katie Baldwin
Stage Manager: Bradley Ashby
Set Designer: Jadon Peck
Lighting Designer: Samuel Kearney
Costume Designer: Erin K. Miller
Properties Designer: Greta Miller
Sound Designer: David Butler

Cast: Mathew Green, Joi Hoffsommer, Lindsey Gates Markel, Martha A. Mills and Mike Prosise.

Remaining Performances: March 10-11 and 14-17 at 8 pm

Running time: 2:20, including one 15-minute intermission

For reservation information, click here.