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The Folger Spotlight

Sense & Sensibility Director's Notes

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From Sense & Sensibility Director Eric Tucker: 

Sense & Sensibility Director Eric Tucker.

Eric Tucker.

Jane Austen would love Facebook. She would spend endless hours tweeting her friends all about Edward Ferrars’ newest waistcoat. She’d Instagram and Snapchat her way through London society. She’d thoroughly enjoy watching Mr. Darcy on The Bachelor with a bevy of eligible, young creatures swarming and swooning around him each week.

When commenting on Jane as a teenager, one of her neighbors called her: “the prettiest, silliest, most affected, husband-hunting butterfly she ever remembered.” And although she was liberal with her relationship advice, Jane herself never married.

Somehow, in the end, she managed to write some of the most memorable love stories the world has ever known, and like William Shakespeare himself, her stories have endured the test of time. Like Shakespeare, Austen’s characters are three dimensional, fully formed, magnificent (however flawed) human beings.

Austen’s stories resonate with us today because not all that much has really changed about people. We love gossip and intrigue and celebrity. We fall in love with people we can’t have and people we shouldn’t have and people our parents hate. We find love and lose love and talk about love and dream about love and obsess about love. Some of us have happy endings and some of us don’t. People get married and have babies and spend their lives together after falling in love and sometimes love has nothing to do with it.

So, we’re telling this story, not because Jane Austen would have been a ferocious Tweeter (“if I loved you less I might be able to talk about it more”), but because Jane Austen was writing about all of us for all time. Because she’s insightful and funny and deliciously witty and edgier than we remembered and, in spite of never finding love herself, managed to write one of the best endings a story ever had since Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.

I think that if Jane Austen had written plays, they’d sound like this one.  And if she were alive, we’d totally be Facebook friends.

Click here to listen to Eric Tucker discuss Sense and Sensibility‘s mobile staging. Recorded at the Haskell Center at the Folger Shakespeare Library, September 15, 2016.

200x200Don’t miss Sense & Sensibility at the Folger! For tickets and more information, visit us online or call the Folger Box at 202.544.7077.

Folger Theatre

Folger Theatre is the vibrant center piece of the Folger’s public programs. With a focus on Shakespeare, Folger Theatre produces plays reflecting the breadth of the library’s peerless collection. In this unique setting, with collaborations between artists and experts, Folger Theatre produces innovative stagings that have been commended as “breathtakingly original...strikingly contemporary” (The Washington Post). Led since 1991 by Artistic Producer Janet Alexander Griffin, Folger Theatre has received 135 nominations and 23 Helen Hayes Awards for excellence in acting, direction, design, and production. During the recent seasons Folger Theatre has received the Outstanding Resident Play Award for its productions of Measure for Measure in 2007, Hamlet in 2011 and The Taming of the Shrew in 2013. Other highlights from Folger Theatre’s producing history include these Helen Hayes Award recipients or nominees for outstanding production: Romeo and Juliet (2013), Orestes: A Tragic Romp (2010), Henry VIII (2010), Arcadia (2009), Macbeth (2008), The Two Gentlemen of Verona (2006), Melissa Arctic (2006), She Stoops to Conquer (2002), Shakespeare’s R & J (2001), Much Ado About Nothing (1998), and Romeo and Juliet (1997). — View all posts by Folger Theatre

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[…] Folger Theatre Sense & Sensibility by Kate Hamill, from the novel by Jane Austen Directed by Eric Tucker***, Folger Theatre, 2016 Read the director’s notes for the production […]

ENCORES: “Sense & Sensibility” performed by Folger Theatre (2016) - The Folger Spotlight — May 5, 2021