Great Lakes Theater treats Austen’s ‘Pride and Prejudice’ with austerity Bob Abelman Cleveland Jewish News, The News Herald, The Morning Journal Member, American Theatre Critics Association “In an innovative, tradition-defying rethinking of one of the greatest comedies in the English language,” begins a satirical article in a recent posting on theonion.com, “Morristown Community Players director Kevin Hiles announced Monday his bold intention to set his theater's production of Shakespeare's ‘The Merchant of Venice’ in 16th-century Venice.” "I know when most people hear ‘The Merchant Of Venice,’ they think 1960s Las Vegas, a high-powered Manhattan stock brokerage, or an 18th-century Georgia slave plantation, but I think it's high time to shake things up a bit," Hiles said. Despite Great Lakes Theater’s propensity for re-envisioning classic works, it too has gone the risky route of staging the theater version of Jane Austen’s novel “Pride and Prejudice” in the time, place and spirit in which it was penned and published over 200 years ago. In the playbill, director/co-adapter Joseph Hanreddy calls “Pride and Prejudice” a “perfectly written novel” and treats it as a sacred text for this production. His and J.R. Sullivan’s script works hard at maintaining the work’s narrative voice and calls for fairly bare-boned staging so as not to detract from Austen’s precise prose. The show’s austerity may not be to everyone’s liking and, as Morristown Community Players director Kevin Hiles learned, “audiences may be taken aback initially by the lack of Creole accents.” But Jane Austen fans will likely be delighted by this production. For more of this article, go to www.clevelandjewishnews.com/columnists/bob_abelman/