Riverside Theatre in Iowa City staging American premiere of ‘Bronte: The World Without’

Sometimes, all you need to do is ask.

After Adam Knight, Riverside Theatre’s producing artistic director, saw an adaptation of “Little Women” by Jordi Mand at the 2022 Stratford Festival in Ontario, he discovered Mand also had written a play about the Bronte sisters. It had premiered at Stratford in 2018, but hadn’t been produced in the United States.

Until now.

Riverside Theatre audiences will learn more about the sisters who wrote “Jane Eyre,” “Wuthering Heights” and “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,” when “Bronte: The World Without” makes its American premiere in Iowa City from Nov. 30 to Dec. 10, 2023.

Knight initially wrote to the playwright’s representative, got a copy of the script, “and loved it,” he said.

“I just love the Bronte sisters. I've been to their home in Haworth (England), and I've just always found their story so fascinating,” he said. “In fact, Chekhov was thinking about the Bronte sisters when he wrote ‘Three Sisters.’ ”

Riverside Theatre was granted the rights to produce the show.

The story

The play offers a taste of what it was like for three ambitious women, born in the early 19th century, to live their dreams at a time when such notions were suppressed.

“I don't think everyone realizes that these novels were published under a nom de plume,” Knight said. “It was still considered not permissible for women to publish under their own names. Writing was a man's profession. And so the choice for these three women to a consider writing as a profession at all, and to finally decide to reveal themselves as women, took enormous guts.

“And I think that it affected each of them differently,” he added. “All three of them died quite young. Of the three, only Charlotte really experienced some degree of fame in her lifetime. And so you get to see how three very sheltered people deal with all of a sudden being public figures and having their very personal writing become fodder for criticism and in the public (eye).”

Even though it’s not a holiday-themed show, director Juliana Frey-Mendez sees parallels through the family dynamics playing out in the home in which Charlotte, Emily and Anne grew up in the early 19th century. Except for times when they served as governesses, they lived with their father, a minister, and their brother who led a troubled life, Knight noted.

“I think everybody knows what it's like to navigate family, and to have to sort of wrestle with how much you love someone and how much they're frustrating you,” said Frey-Mendez, 34. An Iowa City native, she now lives in Columbia, Mo., where she works as an adjunct professor at the University of Missouri, as well as a freelance director.

“Yes, it's a story about these three sisters, but it's also a story about what it means to be an author and artist, a storyteller, and what it means to stay true to your authentic voice in the face of so many pressures that are working against you.

“For me, the title of the play is really telling. It's ‘Bronte: A World Without,’ and these women really were at war in many ways with the society that was telling them how to behave, telling them how to think, telling them what they were good at, telling them what was right and what was wrong,” she said.

“And I think that the fact that we have these stories and that they have endured is really a testament to the human spirit, and to the resilience of the imagination. To be able to dream what could be in a world of your own making is not just something that artists and creatives need to hear. But I think we as people need to remember that there is great power in collective imagining.”

The play will evoke a range of emotions, so “come ready to laugh, to cry, to take in some beautiful sights and sounds,” Frey-Mendez said.

“The sound has been composed specifically for this production,” she noted.

Audiences will be seated on either side of the playing space, creating a long alley that serves not only as a room in the Bronte home, but also moves the sisters back and forth time and space, via projections.

The action takes place over three years, when the sisters are reunited after being apart, on through the publishing of their novels, “and how success changes the dynamic,” Frey-Mendez said.

“I'm really excited not just for people to see the space and the acting, but also just to experience the projections, and the way we are thinking about shadow and sort of creating this haunting Gothic, Victorian experience,” she added.

Knight is thrilled to bring this facet of their lives to Riverside’s home.

“It's so great, especially being in a City of Literature,” he said, “because here are these three literary titans, and it's a chance to tell their story on our stage in the city that celebrates the written word.”

Comments: (319) 368-8508; diana.nollen@thegazette.com