Sense and Sensibility | April Theater Production

Director's Notes

Jane Austen’s novels remain highly relatable today because, despite the 200-year gap, the fundamental human experiences of love, desire, and the social complexities of finding a partner have not changed. Her stories explore the tension between personal emotional desires, and social pressures. While her works examine the economic necessity of marriage, she explored one’s need for finding love.

Love is a tricky state. The heart wants what it wants. Sometimes we fall in love with people who don’t return our love or love someone we can’t have, want people we shouldn’t have and choose partners our piers or parents may disapprove of. We want love, need love, fall in love, lose love and gossip about love. Love is the hot topic people like to gossip about: who loves who, who wants who, who shouldn’t be with who, while dreaming about finding true love. We are fascinated with other people’s relationships.

Within her stories, Jane expresses the challenge of ones need to find love when matched in marriage, pushing back on societies restraints and requirements of finding a husband. While Jane Austen herself never married, she understood the importance of finding a match. Jane was just as invested in the topic then as we are now, and in the end chose self-love and intellectual freedom over a purely financial union.

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