Festival dramaturg Kee-Yoon Nahm spoke with director and adapter Quetta Carpenter about the upcoming production of Sense and Sensibility at the Illinois Shakespeare Festival (ISF). This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Kee-Yoon Nahm (KN): Before we talk about Sense and Sensibility, would you walk me through your history with ISF?
Quetta Carpenter (QC): I was in Love’s Labour’s Lost and Richard II in 2015. Then, I came back in 2018 for The Merry Wives of Windsor, Shakespeare in Love, and Henry V. I directed Caesar, my adaptation of Julius Caesar, in 2019. And then, in 2022, I was in Much Ado about Nothing and King Lear. And now I am back to direct Sense and Sensibility.
KN: You have racked up quite some credits with ISF. What has been your relationship with Shakespeare in general in your professional work?
QC: My first professional job was at the Utah Shakespeare Festival (USF) in 1992. Before that, I went to the High School Shakespeare Camp at USF where you got to study Shakespeare with the actors in the company. They would direct you in little scenes. It was the coolest thing that I did as a young person. I fell in love with Shakespeare when I was 16 and ended up going to Southern Utah University, where USF is held. From there, I started working at different festivals. If you have the skill set to perform Shakespeare, it is something that you can get hired to do a lot. But I also enjoyed doing it. Then, I started adapting Shakespeare in 2015. I found that getting cast as a woman in Shakespeare is always unbalanced. I wanted better parts, both for myself and other women so that they could build their resumes. Instead of waiting for somebody to create these opportunities, I decided to do it myself.
KN: Both Caesar and Sense and Sensibility are your own adapted scripts. I love what you said about creating more and better roles for yourself and other female actors than what would be available if the plays were cast traditionally. But aside from that, did your decision to adapt the classics come from an interest in playwriting?
QC: No, not really, although I have always been a writer. When I was in Richard II, I remember being up in the balcony watching the first scene. There were a couple of women onstage who had been cast in men’s roles and dressed as men. I thought, “Would the whole play really fall apart if those women were in dresses instead?” The more I thought about it, the more I realized that changing some of the characters to women does not fundamentally change the story. Or, if it does, the change is interesting. I started playing with that and found that I loved it. As an actor doing Shakespeare, I also found that there are a lot of archaic expressions in the text. The director and actors know what they mean, but no matter how well you act it the audience is not going to get the exact meaning of the line. So, I liked being able to go into the text and lift out some of the more archaic references. Changing small things for clarity helps the audience follow along more easily.
“I wanted better parts, both for myself and other women so that they could build their resumes. Instead of waiting for somebody to create these opportunities, I decided to do it myself.”
KN: I agree. As a dramaturg, I think a lot about people who are listening to Shakespeare’s language today. Shakespeare wrote these plays for a different audience, even if many of the ideas and emotions are relatable to us now. I think adaptation can help his plays meet the audience halfway. Almost all modern productions of Shakespeare do some work on the text, such as making cuts, replacing esoteric words, and streamlining scenes for pacing. So, why not be up front about it by saying that the play is an adaptation?
QC: I call it “upcycling.” I am upcycling a really beautiful play and making something different out of it. I like that better than saying that this is a “faithful” production of a Shakespeare play. On the other hand, I think Sense and Sensibility is the most faithful adaptation I have ever done. With Jane Austen, I found that I did not have to gender-bend that much. I did not have to find roles for women because there are already tons of roles there.
KN: Yet at the same time, you really had to flex your playwriting muscles because you are adapting a novel into a stage play, as opposed to adapting Shakespeare, which is already in drama form. What was your adaptation process for Sense and Sensibility like?
QC: I started by making sticky notes for all the events in the novel and put them in chronological order on my table. I decided which scenes I really needed and which ones I did not. I cut the plot down to the essential scenes and figured out what was missing. I also figured out which characters I could lose because I had to cut the cast of characters down to fit the ISF acting company. Still, I wanted to make sure that the coming-of-age story of two teenage girls was at the center of the play.
KN: One of the great things that sets your adaptation apart from other versions of Sense and Sensibility is Margaret Dashwood as the narrator. Would you tell me about how that idea came about?
QC: The thing that bothers me about some other theatrical adaptations of Jane Austen is that you lose Austen’s voice. You get the story and the dialogue. But you do not get a lot of the great commentary that Austen provides about the plight of women in these situations, which resonates with our society now. You also miss her commentary on the economic realities that cause those situations. Having a narrator character allows us to talk about these things. I normally shy away from using narrators in plays. But I invented the Margaret narrator so that she could be a container for Jane Austen’s voice.
KN: Who exactly is Margaret Dashwood?
QC: In the novel, Margaret is the youngest of the three Dashwood daughters. I think she is only mentioned three times in the book. So, there is very little information about this forgotten third child. Most adaptations of Sense and Sensibility cut the character. But I liked the idea of Elinor and Marianne having a younger sister. Margaret’s existence also exacerbates the economic problem that the Dashwoods face. Margaret is 13 within the story, but I imagine that Margaret the narrator is around 22. She is writing the story long after the events of the novel have taken place. Even though she is ostensibly writing the story in the time period, she is also talking to us in 2024. This helps make the play a little more accessible because some of the societal norms and expectations of behavior can be hard to understand unless you are an Austen nerd like me.
KN: You also seem to have had Ewing Theatre and the ISF production environment in mind when you were working on the adaptation. You mentioned cutting the cast of characters down to fit the ISF acting company. How did your experience working at ISF for multiple seasons affect your adaptation process?
QC: I know the space. I know how long it takes to get from one end of the stage to the other. Knowing how long things take, I was able to figure out how much time would pass between someone leaving through one entrance and coming in through another. From a practical standpoint, it was very helpful knowing the Ewing Theatre as well as I do. But also, some of my favorite moments in ISF were when we experimented with using the space. For example, in Love Labour’s Lost, we entered from the aisles in the audience a lot. I do not want the audience to feel like they are watching something far away. I want them to feel like they are involved in the story. Bringing people in and out of the aisles helps make it feel like the story is happening around you. This especially works well with Margaret as the narrator, who can talk directly to the audience and ask them to come along with her on the story. Knowing how the theatre is built, I was able to write specifically for that space.
“I do not want the audience to feel like they are watching something far away. I want them to feel like they are involved in the story.”
KN: I know that you have had multiple readings and workshops of this adaptation in the past year. How did the script change through these workshops? What did you learn from having different actors read the play?
QC: In the first reading, I learned that Margaret as the narrator was really dry. She felt like a bad voiceover. That is when I realized that she needs to be a person. And I figured that out. I also learned where the humor was, as well as which parts of the script the actors knew exactly what to do with and where they struggled. I learned where the syntax was too complicated. You have to remember that Jane Austen’s novels were meant to be read, not spoken. Once you speak her prose, you realize there are a lot of parentheticals. (Austen loved parentheticals!) Until you hear it out loud, you do not really know how cumbersome some of the language is. Through the workshops, I was able to streamline and update the language without losing the Jane Austen-ness of it.
KN: The novel was published in 1811. But you moved the beginning of the story a few years to 1816, which Margaret explains to the audience. What led to that decision?
QC: I was adapting Frankenstein at the same time I was working on Sense and Sensibility. And Mary Shelley has this wonderful introduction to the 1831 version, where she talks about the summer of 1816 when she wrote the novel. It was the year that the world basically did not have a summer. The climate was abnormal because of a volcanic eruption on Mount Tambora the previous year. The winter was unusually harsh. Crops failed, so grain was very expensive, which made everything very expensive. It was impossible to feed horses, so transportation broke down. It occurred to me that we have been living through similar conditions since COVID with supply chains breaking down and inflation. So, I thought that if I move the timeline a few years, it would exacerbate the economic issues that the Dashwoods are facing, which is mentioned a lot in the novel but dropped from a lot of adaptations in favor of the love story. It also makes the story resonate more with the times we are in now.
KN: That is very interesting. When I think of Jane Austen novels, I usually imagine people riding carriages through an idyllic countryside or having tea in drawing rooms. But the economic stakes are high for the characters in Sense and Sensibility. Elinor and Marianne cannot just wait indefinitely for men to propose to them because their family needs money now.
QC: Later in the story, Elinor and Marianne are in London and want to return home. But they cannot leave right away because they cannot afford the trip. Basic transportation might not be a problem in a modern context, but horses were expensive to maintain at the time. So, changing the year to 1816 raises the stakes in a way that can highlight themes in the novel that often get lost. Also, there are so many rainstorms in Sense and Sensibility. Everybody is getting caught in rainstorms. I think the “Year Without Summer” is also a nice explanation for why there is so much rain. It was sort of a happy accident, but I love it. It is actually one of the last changes I made before the script was finalized.
KN: Well, I hope that the storms only occur in the story and not in the actual theatre.
QC: There is always the possibility. When I was in King Lear two years ago, some of my favorite performances were nights when the storm was actually brewing. Henson Keys as King Lear is up in the balcony, starting to lose his mind a little bit. And it was perfect when misty rain was falling on him. It also happened when Kevin Rich played Richard II in 2015. He was giving the “No matter where. Of comfort no man speak” speech downstage. And I remember seeing him look up, and this gentle rain was falling on him in the light. It was stunning. Weather is going to happen regardless. So, I think the smart thing to do is to embrace it. In fact, nature is an important element in the novel, which we have reflected in the design. Nature becomes a character in the story, especially when they have conversations about the picturesque landscape.
KN: Well, if you want to see something picturesque, just take a stroll through the Ewing Cultural Center grounds!
QC: Exactly. This is the perfect place to tell this story.
KN: Going back to how this story resonates with our times, I also think about the experiences of millennials and Gen Z today. Statistics show that fewer people are getting married than previous generations. I think part of that has to do with how prospects for the future are so dire for young people. They have to think hard about whether they can afford getting married or having children. That can impact how romantic relationships take shape.
QC: In Jane Austen’s time, the only way that women could survive economically was to get married because they could not work for the most part. You could take on sewing or farm labor, but it would entail a huge drop in social standing. So, if your family did not have money, marriage was the only way. Of course, that is not the case now. But I think we trick ourselves into thinking that we are free from thinking about the economic implications of marriage. Women still make less than men and have less avenues to positions of power than men. So, sometimes the most successful way to get the life you want is to marry someone who is higher in status. The idea that there is a transactional element to marriage applies to men as well. There are tax implications, for example. Even today, marriage is to some degree a financial arrangement. With things like the pandemic and the housing crisis and extreme inflation, I think we are all asking ourselves how we are going to keep doing more with less every year. And that will impact someone who is thinking about getting married in this economic situation.
Speaking of younger generations, I think this is also a story about how you perceive love differently when you are an adult as opposed to when you are a child or teenager. What does it mean to actually love someone—as in caring for them—rather than just think they are cute? I think Sense and Sensibility is a coming-of-age story in addition to being a love story. Marianne and Elinor both pay a price for their choices and learn about love in the process. Marianne chooses to let everything hang out, and she pays the price by being the subject of gossip and scandal. Meanwhile, Elinor pays the price of carrying everything alone and having no one’s sympathy. Nobody thinks she is going through a difficult time because she does not share it. Both sisters learn something about themselves and each other. Regarding the title, I do not think that either “sense” or “sensibility” wins in the end. I think Austen is saying that we need both—a balance between prudence and strong feelings.
KN: Those are all the questions I have. We have talked about a lot of things, which will give our audiences an idea of what to expect this summer. Is there anything else you would like to mention?
QC: I would just like to say that I am an unembarrassed lover of love stories. And while I am talking about all the feminist and economic themes in the novel, I do not want to lose the point that this is still a great love story. It is the kind of story that I love the most: the kind that keeps you guessing. I hope the audience loves this story as much as I do. This is maybe embarrassing to say, but I have read the script out loud in my apartment to see how long it is. I played all the parts. It was so fun. But I choked up as I was reading because the story really gets to me, even though I wrote the adaptation and read it many times. I think I often present myself as a cynic in real life, but at the end of the day, I am quite a softie and this is my jam.
KN: I think audiences will definitely feel the love and care you bring to Austen’s novel. I am excited to see it!
“I think Sense and Sensibility is a coming-of-age story in addition to being a love story.”
