NY Review: 'Afternoon Tea With Jane Austen'

Sharing a cup and an hour with the Regency's most celebrated novelist. How lovely, you would think, and you'd mostly be right. Author and actor Tali Brady has written a charming, insightful, and well-researched "autobiography" for Jane Austen and plays her with grace and wit. Brady even looks the part in a pink high-waisted Regency frock, and she delivers her lines in a believable and consistent period English accent. Yet some misfires in Brady's writing and Bruce Lambie's direction mar the experience.

The basic conceit—that Austen has come back from the dead after almost 200 years to set the record straight—is fair enough if hardly original. Dissatisfied with her would-be biographers, including one of her brothers, Austen wants to go back to basic sources (mostly letters) to re-create the feistier, naughtier girl she knows she was. The genteel country spinster was only part of her story. So far, so good.

But then "Austen" comes crashing through the fourth wall as our hostess asks for a show of hands from those who have read at least one of her books. (We'd hardly be in the audience if we hadn't.) Soon come contemporary references to "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies," Emma Thompson, Monty Python, and a swipe at the way we jiggle up and down when we dance in the 21st century, as opposed to the studied gliding of Austen's own day. These attempts to involve the audience are jarring and unnecessary.

The titular tea is also problematic. Brady drinks several cups of what looks like the real thing, but she always does so while standing up, holding the cup and leaving the saucer on the table. No English gentlewoman of today would do such a thing, much less a gentlewoman of the early 19th century. I realize that both Brady and Austen as depicted are young and that props can be expensive, but having the woman sit down in a borrowed faux Regency chair next to an appropriate side table and holding the saucer in one hand while sipping from the cup in the other would have been an easy visual complement to the words and the performance.

Even more egregious are the linguistic gaffes. Austen did not write or say "hopefully to get married" instead of "one hoped to get married." When she said that her mother wanted her sister "Cassandra and I to get married" I winced, but I put it down to opening-night jitters and a one-time slip of the tongue, not the pen. But then, when but a paragraph later, she said that another of her brothers had given "Cassandra and I" bracelets, I lost it. I refuse to believe that one of the greatest authors who ever lived wrote with bad grammar. And if somehow she did, twice, please correct it or at least explain it.

Presented by Orange Wine Productions as part of 2012 Frigid New York at the Red Room, 85 E. Fourth St., NYC. Feb. 24–March 4. Remaining performances: Mon., Feb. 27, 9:30 p.m.; Wed., Feb. 29, 6:30 p.m.; Fri., March 2, 9:30 p.m.; Sun., March 4, 3:30 p.m. (212) 868-4444, www.smarttix.com, www.frigidnewyork.info.