Fashionable Friends

Laura Engel’s adaptation of Mary Berry’s play Fashionable Friends (originally staged 1801, published 1802) at the Lewis Walpole Library in Farmington, Connecticut, recalls Netflix’s Bridgerton by the manner it ingeniously brings the late eighteenth century hurtling to the present through sumptuous period costumes with a modern flare, evocative historical settings, playful musical interludes, seamless choreography, and cherry-picked suggestive dialogue. And like Queen Charlotte—the latest installment from the Bridgerton world—it is the superficial nature of aristocratic women’s friendships that is the order of the day. Just as Lady Danbury urges Lady Bridgerton to escape the social confines of artificial feminine connections, so too do Lady Selina and Mrs. Lovell evade the intersectional restrictions of class and gender on their loving, homoerotically charged connection. Without changing a word from the original script, Engel and her company adeptly abridge, transpose, and translate Fashionable Friends so that it is equally intelligible and entertaining to a modern audience.But Engel’s play surpasses the sensuality of Bridgerton by offering a fully immersive experience that incorporates the materiality and tangibility of live performance. Touch is the first sense the production engages as the audience crosses the carpeted floor of the Walpole Library’s New Library, picks up its masquerade masks and programs, and sinks into the cushions of the library’s antique chairs. There is an audible buzz as the audience members inspect their masks: we too have a part to play. The performance begins, and visual cues make clear who the fashionable friends are, as Mrs. Lovell (Sadie Crow) and Lady Selina (Amy Dick) appear resplendent in their white Neoclassical dresses while Sir Dudley (Eric Leslie) and Mr. Lovell (Christopher Collier)—in their brown three-piece suits and top hats—fade into the library’s wood-paneled backdrop. Despite the men’s best efforts, it is the women’s time to shine. As the fashionable friends sit on their respective love seats, we glimpse white sneakers under their floor-length dresses. Not just a playful allusion to modern fashions, this detail signals that there is more to our heroines than first meets the eye. We are, therefore, invited to look beyond surface-level appearances to make sense of the ambiguous nature of their fashionable friendship.Adding to the challenge that Mrs. Lovell and Lady Selina’s friendship poses to heteronormativity, the more aged Mrs. Racket (Sadie Crow) further disrupts the gender binary. Although she retains the feminine-coded white dress, it is adorned with brown accessories—the color of the men’s costumes— that signal her ambiguous gender status as the archetypal, seemingly sexless elderly widow. This construct is immediately discarded as Mrs. Lovell quite literally takes her white gloves off, removes her brown shawl and hat, and plots in vain to steal her daughter’s fiancée, Sir Dudley. By contrast, Miss Lovell (Amy Dick) is played through the puppet of an American Girl doll, humorously conveying the extreme constraints of young femininity in the British eighteenth century to a modern American audience.The clever costuming, set, and props are matched by witty aural clues, exemplified at the masked ball, at which the disillusioned Mr. and Mrs. Lovell unknowingly rekindle their stale marriage under their masked disguises to the tune of Rupert Holmes’s “Escape (The Piña Colada Song).” Although the song signals the end of Lady Selina and Mrs. Lovell’s homoerotically charged connection, the music’s comic relief conveys the bittersweetness of this conclusion. Lady Selina may be heartbroken by the loss of her intimate connection with Mrs. Lovell, but there is a hopeful suggestiveness in her resolution to visit another friend in Naples. The audience is then invited to embody this uplifting ending by rising to dance at the ball to the tune of Kool and the Gang’s “Celebration.”This ending both encapsulates the fun-filled, tongue-in-cheek energy of the production and reminds us of the importance of embodied performance and spectatorship to our understanding of performance history. Fashionable Friends premiered as a private theatrical, and we soon felt transported to the original performance in the intimate, historical interior of the Walpole Library. The parallels between the intimate setting and the subject matter helped us make sense—“sense” being the operative word—of why the original production flopped when relocated to a bigger, public theatre. Engel’s choice to restage the play in a setting that was as intimate as that of its premiere restored Berry’s play to its original success.

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