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Bag & Baggage didn't plan to stage Brontë in a public library. But weeks before the show about the three Brontë sisters opened, the company was informed of the pending sale of the Venetian Theatre, its venue for more than a decade. With limited venue options in Hillsboro, the significantly smaller Hillsboro Brookwood Library was its best bet. So in the company's immersive production, the Brontë sisters lead the audience past bookshelves displaying a Star Wars novel and posters of Nathan Fillion and Taylor Swift.
But it's not difficult to ignore the library's vestiges of modernity: Director Michelle Milne has configured the play for the library so skillfully it's difficult to imagine enjoying Brontë anywhere else. By weaving the lives of Charlotte and her sisters through doorways and between bookshelves, she has created a production that physically unfolds.
Related: Bag & Baggage cancel Noises Off Due to Potential Sale of their theater.
The play is set in the Brontë family home in West Yorkshire, where Charlotte (Cassie Greer), Emily (Morgan Cox) and Anne (Jessi Walters) live with their cranky father, Patrick (Peter Schuyler), and their volatile brother, Branwell (Joe Copsey). However, it's not a straightforward domestic drama but a vortex of stormy philosophical conversations and brainstorming sessions, in which surreal cameos by characters from Charlotte's Jane Eyre and Emily's Wuthering Heights explore how the torments endured by the sisters' literary avatars may have mirrored their creators' isolation.
The Brontës remain confined to their home for the majority of the story, although the vastness of the library keeps the play from becoming claustrophobic. It also helps that the cast seems remarkably comfortable working in an unconventional space, including Copsey, whose fascinatingly unhinged performance as the alcoholic Branwell heralds the beginning of the end of the Brontës.
That end—a sober reckoning with mortality for the three sisters—is almost unbearable to witness. Yet Milne's inventive staging and the cast's dexterous navigation of fierce emotional waters keep Brontë from descending into oppressive bleakness, allowing you to forget that you're sitting in a modern library and, for just over two hours, to take part in the Brontës' strange and lonely lives. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON.
SEE IT: Brontë is at Hillsboro Brookwood Library, 2850 NE Brookwood Parkway, 503-345-9590, bagnbaggage.org. 7:30 pm Friday-Sunday, through March 26. $25-$30.