The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie at Gremlin Theatre

Dark & Stormy Productions is a theater company that launched in 2012 and has, I’m assured, been producing strong productions for over a decade now. So how is it that The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is the first time I’ve ever seen one of their productions? Don’t even try and answer that, it’s an unanswerable question. Well now that we have connected, I can assure you this will not be the last. The play The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is an adaptation of the 1961 Muriel Spark novel. Written in 1966 by Jay Presson Allen it is a play that is as relevant now as it ever was. It focuses on the undue influence a charismatic figure of authority has on a group of you and impressionable girls. In an age of grooming and charismatic would be dictators, the themes explored in the play have eerie contemporary connections. Dark & Stormy’s production finds ways of highlighting those similarities without losing sight of the story it’s telling. It remains as much about the characters as it does the ideas which makes it, as a whole all the more effective.

Structured as a memory play, what we see is in the mind of Sister Helena, a Nun who is being interviewed by a journalist about a book she has written. She tells him about Miss Jean Brodie, a teacher, whom to hear her tell it is in her prime. She askews teaching in the traditional sense instead regaling her class with tales of her holiday in Italy and the great love of her life who died in the first World War. She selects four girls from her class and showers them with attention singling them out. She exclaims over and over how she is giving them all of herself at her prime, when clearly it’s all about them giving her all of themselves. The size of her ego is matched only by her ability to manipulate the naive girls in her charge with clever phrases and unique worldview. To those unaccustomed to thinking for themselves, she easily convinces them to buy into her values and follow her instructions under the guise that she is teaching them to think for themselves. At first, we can see the cracks in the in the foundation, but we can also see how attractive the attention of this “cool” teacher is to these young girls whom she makes feel special. By the time she is praising dictators and suggesting that inappropriate sexual actions are fine, it’s clear that if Donald Trump has ever read Spark’s book or seen the play or film adaptations, he may have taken some notes.

Sara Marsh who is also the Artistic Director of Dark & Stormy Productions plays the titular character with all the command and charisma the character requires. In lesser hands the sway she holds over her students, the men in her life, and the headmistress of the school might not work. You need to be able to feel the power she has as this force of nature and Marsh nails it. Her students are all played by relative newcomers all either recent graduates or students at the University of Minnesota. They are Shayla Courteau, Jennifer Donovan, Alice Wenzlow, and Cece Roth and they are all very good. Courteau has the biggest role as Sandy, the student on whom Miss Brodie feels she can always rely on. Courteau is going to be one to watch, she gets to to play different sides of Sandy as she grows the the obvious leader of the young girls, perhaps a little bit of a mean girl, to the one who sees through Brodie and begins to understand her for what she is. She’s particularly good when she reacts to the offhand slights Brodie throws around, she’s subtle while also making sure we in the audience register the hurt it causes. Katie Willer is very good as Miss MacKay, the Headmistress, her best scenes are her attempts to reason with and then eventually try and expel Brodie. Peter Christian Hansen and Alex Galick play the two love interests. Hansen uses is classical good looks and charms to full effect as the womanizing painter whose morals are atrocious but who nonetheless is able, when the time comes, to believably take the moral high ground over Brodie. Galick, the music teacher whom is completely under Brodie’s control, has a couple of nice moments of physical humor, that help to illustrate his characters subservience.

Director Allison Vincent seems to be everywhere lately and thank goodness for that. Here Vincent uses the Gremlin Theatre’s black box aesthetic as an asset in helping to create the feeling of a memory. Having the focus shift from the storyteller Sister Helena as she looks upstage into the past with the assistance of Lighting Designer Mary Shabatura. Rick Polenek’s scenic and prop designs are simple items that can be moved on and off quickly to suggest the new setting again reinforcing the notion that this is a memory and we are seeing just what is important in that memory, we don’t need to see the other dozens of school girls just the four that were the focus, just as we don’t need to see the Headmistresses entire office, her desk and two chairs and a flower on the desk are all that matters. Finally, the Sound Design by Aaron Newman also contributes to the memory idea, have voices come flooding in as the Nun begins to remember and a nice audio distortion that happens towards the end with the word assassin, which conveys the idea that that word was seared onto sister Helena’s memory.

Now maybe it sounds like it’s all a bit heavy but as I said before Vincent does a great job of making the themes and ideas present while still telling an interesting and entertaining story, there’s a lot of humor and some rather clever writing. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie runs through September 17th at The Gremlin Theatre in St. Paul for more information and to purchase tickets go to https://www.darkstormy.org/current-production-1

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