A “Pride and Prejudice” Read-Along

Our final production of the 2024 season is Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley by Lauren Gunderson and Margot Melcon. The play is a kind of sequel to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Rest assured, you don’t need to have read the novel or seen an adaptation of it to enjoy the production. Yet, we thought it would be fun to host a 30-day read-along of this beloved classic right before we open the delightful holiday romantic comedy.


Hello, everyone!

I’m Tim, and I’m a member of the professional resident ensemble at the Commonweal Theatre Company. You may have seen me on stage (this season I was Kelvin in Ugly Lies the Bone, and I’m playing Ken in Rumors). I also do a bit of work behind-the-scenes on the Marketing Team–working on social media, copy-writing, and other areas to help spread the word about the wonderful storytelling we love to share with you.

I love stories. I love language. I love books.

But I have a confession to make.

I have never read a bit of Jane Austen before. I’ve never performed in a Jane Austen adaptation for the theatre, either. (I have seen a number of her film and television adaptations). But still, to this day, I have never cracked open her books.

That changes this fall.

The Commonweal Theatre’s final production of the 2024 season is Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley by Lauren Gunderson and Margot Melcon. They have crafted a new holiday classic by writing a sequel or spin-off of sorts to Jane Austen’s beloved Pride and Prejudice.

Having read the play a few times, I will go on record saying that if you have absolutely no connection to Pride and Prejudice, you needn’t worry. Your understanding of Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley doesn’t rely on having read or seen Pride and Prejudice before. Rest assured.

But, maybe, just maybe, your enjoyment of the production could deepen.

And if nothing else, maybe this is the chance you finally get around to reading a classic, and you won’t be alone!

So, from October 15 through November 15, I invite you to read Pride and Prejudice with me. This book is in the public domain, so you can read it for free online, or pick up your favorite edition at a bookstore. (I picked up this paperback edition.) 

Since we’ll all be working with different editions, there’s no way to track page numbers. But, I’ve created a schedule to read, on average, 2 chapters a day. According to my edition, it’s usually around 10-15 pages a day. At the end of each week, I’ll post some reflections, favorite passages, and questions right here on this blog. I’ll invite you to play along in the comments or on social media posts on our Facebook and Instagram pages.

Think of it as a low-key, no pressure digital book club. I’ll check back in when we get closer to Oct. 15. In the meantime, track down your favorite edition and get ready for what I hear is a witty, rich, and sweeping story.

Here’s a description of the book from the publishers at Oxford World Classics:

Pride and Prejudice, one of the most famous love stories of all time, has also proven itself as a treasured mainstay of the English literary canon. With the arrival of eligible young men in their neighbourhood, the lives of Mr. and Mrs. Bennet and their five daughters are turned inside out and upside down… Misconceptions and hasty judgements bring heartache and scandal, but eventually lead to true understanding, self-knowledge, and love.

It’s almost impossible to open Pride and Prejudice without feeling the pressure of so many readers having known and loved this novel already. Will you fail the test – or will you love it too? As a story that celebrates more unflinchingly than any of Austen’s other novels the happy meeting-of-true-minds, and one that has attracted the most fans over the centuries, Pride and Prejudice sets up an echo chamber of good feelings in which romantic love and the love of reading amplify each other.

I’m excited to have you read along with me!

John Patrick Shanley’s Preface to “Doubt”

What’s under a play? What holds it up? You might as well ask what’s under me? On what am I built? There’s something silent under every person and under every play. There is something unsaid under any given society as well.

There’s a symptom apparent in America right now. It’s evident in political talk shows, in entertainment coverage, in artistic criticism of every kind, in religious discussion. We are living in a courtroom culture. We were living in a celebrity culture, but that’s dead. Now we’re only interested in celebrities if they’re in court. We are living in a culture of extreme advocacy, of confrontation, of judgment, and of verdict. Discussion has given way to debate. Communication has become a contest of wills. Public talking has become obnoxious and insincere. Why? Maybe it’s because deep down under the chatter we have come to a place where we know that we don’t know … anything. But nobody’s willing to say that.

Let me ask you. Have you ever held a position in an argument past the point of comfort? Have you ever defended a way of life you were on the verge of exhausting? Have you ever given service to a creed you no longer utterly believed? Have you ever told a girl you loved her and felt the faint nausea of eroding conviction? I have. That’s an interesting moment. For a playwright, it’s the beginning of an idea. I saw a piece of real estate on which I might build a play, a play that sat on something silent in my life and in my time. I started with a title: Doubt.

What is Doubt? Each of us is like a planet. There’s the crust, which seems eternal. We are confident about who we are. If you ask, we can readily describe our current state. I know my answers to so many questions, as do you. What was your father like? Do you believe in God? Who’s your best friend? What do you want? Your answers are your current topography, seemingly permanent, but deceptively so. Because under that face of easy response, there is another You. And this wordless Being moves just as the instant moves; it presses upward without explanation, fluid and wordless, until the resisting consciousness has no choice but to give way.

It is Doubt (so often experienced initially as weakness) that changes things. When a man feels unsteady, when ·he falters, when hard-won knowledge evaporates before his eyes, he’s on the verge of growth. The subtle or violent reconciliation of the outer person and the inner core often seems at first like a mistake, like you’ve gone the wrong way and you’re lost. But this is just emotion longing for the familiar. Life happens when the tectonic power of your speechless soul breaks through the dead habits of the mind. Doubt is nothing less than an opportunity to reenter
the Present.

The play. I’ve set my story in 1964, when not just me but the whole world seemed to be going through some kind of vast puberty. The old ways were still dominant in behavior, dress, morality, world view, but what had been organic expression had become a dead mask. I was in a Catholic church school in the Bronx, run by the Sisters of Charity. These women dressed in black, believed in Hell, obeyed their male counterparts, and educated us. The faith, which held us together, went beyond the precincts of religion. It was a shared dream we agreed to call Reality. We didn’t know it, but we had a deal, a social contract. We would all believe the same thing. We would all believe.

Looking back, it seems to me, in those schools at that time, we were an ageless unity. We were all adults, and we were all children. We had, like many animals, flocked together for warmth and safety. As a result, we were terribly vulnerable to anyone who chose to hunt us. When trust is the order of the day, predators are free to plunder. And plunder they did. As the ever widening Church scandals reveal, the hunters had a field day. And the shepherds, so invested in the surface, sacrificed actual good for perceived virtue.

I have never forgotten the lessons of that era, nor learned them well enough. I still long for a shared certainty, an assumption of safety, the reassurance of believing that others know better than me what’s for the best. But I have been led by the bitter necessities of an interesting life to value that age-old practice of the wise: Doubt.

There is an uneasy time when belief has begun to slip but hypocrisy has yet to take hold, when the consciousness is disturbed but not yet altered. It is the most dangerous, important, and ongoing experience of life. The beginning of change is the moment of Doubt. It is that crucial moment when I renew my humanity or become a lie.

Doubt requires more courage than conviction does, and more energy; because conviction is a resting place and doubt is infinite – it is a passionate exercise. You may come out of my play uncertain. You may want to be sure. Look down on that feeling. We’ve got to learn to live with a full measure of uncertainty. There is no last word. That’s the silence under the chatter of our time.

John Patrick Shanley
Brooklyn, New York
March 2005


Copyright © 2005, John Patrick Shanley. Reproduced by permission of the author and Dramatists Play Service, Inc.

The Only Thing that Stays the Same…

The Only Thing that Stays the Same…

… is change.

This is what my mom always said. Or was it Heraclitus? Whether it was wisdom spun from a California stock administrator, or a Greek philosopher, I think we can all agree with the sentiment. Just look at the past few blog posts. People moving on, ready to start something new.

This was certainly the case for my fiancé Cody and I when we got into the third year of the pandemic in Chicago, picked up our cats, and headed for Bluff Country. Something about these past few years shifted the air (literally) as we put on masks and realized we needed a fresh breath of it. For a lot of my friends, that meant leaving the big city and going to the country, or vice versa. 


Merry and Duke Orsino

So here we are. Hi! I’m Laurie Roberts and that’s Cody Beyer. I’m from the San Francisco Bay Area and he’s from Nashville. We met in a production of Macbeth that rehearsed over the span of a year, a part of Shakespeare 400 Chicago, a year-long festival celebrating the bard’s work four centuries after his death in 1616. We lived to tell the tale, adopted a kitten (Meriadoc Brandybuck,) fell in love in a bathtub on stage, got engaged, and now we both have matching Minnesota drivers’ licenses. So cute! And so much change. 

Thank you all for your generous and warm welcomes, we are thrilled to be here and we’ll see you at the theater!

Stories of the Body: Lina by Andras Visky, photos by Devron Enarson