Learning to live

Published April 27, 2010 at 9:50 p.m.
URI Theatre’s sprawling Unbound...
Fanny Kemble is known for being a celebrated British actress in her early 19th-century youth and again toward middle age.

Fanny Kemble is known for being a celebrated British actress in her early 19th-century youth and again toward middle age. But it was her difficult maturing process in the interim that provided the meaty part of published journals that gained her greater fame. That also is the subject of Unbound, by Laura Marks, which is being staged by URI Theatre through May 2.

The daughter of a famous acting family, at 20 Fanny first appeared onstage at London’s Covent Garden as a Juliet popular enough to save her father/manager from financial ruin. Five years later, in 1834, having continued to prove captivating in Shakespearean roles, she married an American who was pursuing her while she and her father were touring here.

The Pierce Butler (Benjamin M.S. Grills) we meet here is a smitten but dignified young man who plies her with daily flowers and charming sentiments until she is swayed. He is an independently wealthy Southern aristocrat, and the fact that he is supported by money from slaveholding plantations doesn’t trouble her. But soon he inherits a plantation with 800 slaves on one of the Georgia Sea Islands, and she can no longer deny the fact that her comfort is at the expense of the suffering of others.

This is nominally a memory play, so the older Fanny who is looking back on her life is played by Stephanie Rodger, and the young Fanny is played by Jolie Lippincott. Actually, there are three ensemble Fannys (Nora Eschenheimer, Olivia Khoshatefeh, Jennifer Michaels). Playwright Marks has specified that some lines be said by the older Fanny, to frame the story, but otherwise has left it to the director, here Bryna Wortman, to distribute the young woman’s dialogue.

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