Actors’ Shakespeare Project Crafts An ‘Emma’ We Can All Root For

“Even I’d hate that bitch,” Regine Vital says in her director’s note, referring to the eponymous character of her production of “Emma” for Actors’ Shakespeare Project. First introduced to the world in Jane Austen’s 1815 novel of the same name, Emma Woodhouse (Josephine Moshiri Elwood) has since exasperated everyone — from her fellow characters in the novel itself to Vital and modern feminists with her romantic schemes and gleeful overconfidence.

In Vital’s production of playwright Kate Hamill’s “Emma,” Vital attempts the daunting feat of transforming this arrogant, blinded-by-her-own-privilege woman who very much conforms to the societal conventions of her time into a feminist the audience will want to “root for.”

It’s a tall task indeed, but one that Vital and her cast and crew joyfully achieve by painting a sympathetic portrait of a woman constrained by societal norms but who valiantly strives to achieve her desires nonetheless.

“A mind must have an occupation or it will come to mischief,” Mr. Weston (Dev Luthra) scorns Emma, as she saunters onto a stage with faithful Regency-era decoration including crystal chandeliers, chinoiserie, and elaborate upholstery designed by Saskia Martínez. The line is telling, exposing the aristocrat Emma, without a proper profession to occupy her time, for busying herself with mischief instead. Plotting woefully misinformed matches, she sets her friend Harriet Smith (Liza Giangrande) with ridiculous vicar Mr. Elton (Fady Demian), dismissing Harriet’s true love for groundsman Robert Martin (Fady Demian) because he is beneath Harriet’s station. So clueless is Emma that she even overlooks her own love for Mr. Knightley, imagining herself with the wealthy but unsuitable Frank Churchill (Fady Demian). Costume designer Nia Safarr Banks cleverly dresses Emma in a jean jacket embossed with a chess board, a signal that Emma sees her matchmaking both as an intellectual challenge — sizing up compatible fortunes and personalities — but also as only a game after all.

Emma’s trivial craft thus does little to satiate her inventive mind. Elwood hauntingly conveys Emma’s anguish with a near-hysterical outburst after she lists the many subject areas in which Emma has been educated, revealing the extreme frustration simmering beneath the surface of this brilliant woman, whose talents, in the Regency era, must be devoted to frivolous matchmaking and not anything of higher substance.

Paradoxically, though she is among the most privileged in her society, as Mr. Knightley points out to her in an accusatory tone at the end of the play, she is also one of the most constrained. Her status precludes her from having a serious occupation, unlike Jane Fairfax (Lorraine Victoria Kanyike), her rival throughout the play, who is a member of a lower social class. The sheer desperation in Elwood’s voice conveys the stifling pressure of sexism in Emma’s society, so suffocating it makes even the most privileged woman in society gasp for breath.

This sympathetic portrayal of Emma casts her machinations in a new light. As she convinces Harriet of the vicar’s love for her, Emma’s dramatic charade of waving her arms and kneeling on the ground to demonstrate the vicar's burning desire also affords Emma’s own blazing frustration an outlet. In fact, the societally accepted practice of matchmaking as a whole allows her to release her pent-up brain power and energy, as she nobly aims to secure social mobility for her friend through the only means available to women: Marriage. One can’t help rooting for this dogged woman to succeed, as Vital had hoped, even if her objectives are misguided.

However, it’s soon revealed that “Love has its own agenda,” one entirely independent of Emma’s own; her plot to have Harriet marry Mr. Elton fails and Emma falls in love with her sparring partner, Mr. Knightley. The final scene in which she succumbs to love’s design and marries her foe seems as though it should rid her of the meager power her schemes once afforded her. However, beaming as she reveals that she has decided to become a governess, committing her education and her talents to a worthwhile cause, Emma triumphantly carves out greater agency for herself. Her final happiness results just as much from the joyful kiss she shares with Mr. Knightley as it does from her renewed sense of purpose. Her provocatively unconventional wedding attire, a white jumpsuit with a jewel-encrusted belt, sends a clear message: Emma will henceforth deal with social conventions on her own terms.

“Emma” runs at the Multicultural Arts Center through Dec. 15.