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Congratulations are in order for Portland Center Stage. The city’s largest theater company’s emergency fundraising campaign hit its $8 million goal this summer, plus $2 million in reserves. Its success is a good sign not only for PCS, but for other performing arts companies in the city—namely Portland Opera, which is still embarking on its mission to “Keep Portland Operatic.”
The 2026–27 season is PCS’s 20th at The Armory. Dubbed the “Emerald Season,” it’s unified around the theme “Then. Now. Next.” Officially opening the festivities on Friday, Oct. 2, is PCS artistic director Marissa Wolf’s production of Jane Austen’s most classic of classics, Pride & Prejudice.
Wolf is working from a script by Kate Hamill, who specializes in feminist spins on classic literature. Hamill has adapted several other Austen novels for the stage, including Sense & Sensibility, which PCS put on in 2019. Wolf also directed the playwright’s Dracula adaptation, subtitled A Feminist Revenge Fantasy, Really, in 2023. Both are madcap and hilarious, but Hamill’s scripts have also proven well fitted to PCS’s increased interest in progressive storytelling in recent years.
Wolf’s history with Pride & Prejudice will likely be familiar to many other readers—and viewers. Great as the novel is, it was the iconic 1995 BBC miniseries (starring Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth Bennet and Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy, “before they were big stars,” as Wolf points out) that helped her truly appreciate and visualize the story. “It was very loyal to Austen’s scene-by-scene writing,” Wolf says. “That version will always live in my heart. It centered the women…and you feel the heartbreak and hope right alongside them.”
That feminist center is what really sold Wolf on Hamill’s script, which is less a comedy of manners than of Shakespeare-grade errors. No, there are no unexpected twin characters, but almost every major cast member is pulling double duty or more—for Hamill’s version of Pride & Prejudice casts actors in multiple roles, often quite divergent in terms of gender, age and even archetype.
The story of the Bennet family’s efforts to marry off their daughters is quite well known, but Hamill flips the period drama into a full-on farce. Many characters’ personalities—for example, Mr. Darcy, stiff as ever even when delivering caninelike commands to Mr. Bingley—are exaggerated into slapstick caricatures. Modern tunes sneak in on the piano, reminiscent of Bridgerton). And Elizabeth starts out actively rejecting the idea of marriage (which, admittedly, may turn off some of the more purist members of the audience).
Wolf welcomed the challenge of casting with these multiple roles in mind. “It’s a pragmatic way to produce the play,” she says, “and it requires an expansive capability for the actors.” As an example, Michael O’Connell will play both Mr. Bennet as well as Charlotte. “Charlotte’s a pretty important lynchpin. She’s going to inherit the house, [so] she has a real emotional arc,” Wolf says. “You need an actor who can do the high comedy of Mr. Bennet while capturing the poignant arc of Charlotte.”
As it pertains to this season’s theme, Wolf says this play straddles the line between “then” and “now.” Undeniably, the former manifests in its historical setting. “It’s set in Jane Austen’s world,” Wolf confirms, “with lots of period costumes and set pieces and furniture.”
Where the “now” comes in is the frame of the modern Portland viewer. Hamill’s script confronts, as Wolf described it, “what women were allowed and not allowed to do…what restrictions they faced…and the marriage market as a business deal.” She compliments Hamill’s writing for its sly humor and playful social and political commentary: “[Hamill] is a perfect inheritor of Austen’s work. She honors Austen’s writing and pulls it into a contemporary lens we’ll understand.” Much as women’s rights in the Western world have advanced in the intervening centuries, the satirical bent of Hamill’s script sheds light on just how patriarchal our society remains.
This is only the beginning of a very promising season. Wolf particularly looks forward to Little Shop of Horrors. “It’ll be an incredibly beautiful version,” she says. “Families will want to come as part of their holiday fare.” She is also excited about York Walker’s Covenant, a Southern Gothic tale due in spring 2027: “You won’t know where it’s going…It’ll create a haunted landscape of possession and bring up questions of good and evil.”
In between these plays will also be some comedic shows both expected (Kim’s Convenience, the source material for the international hit Canadian sitcom) and unexpected (The 39 Steps, adapted from one of Alfred Hitchcock’s early espionage thrillers).
But when it comes to starting off the season right, leave it to a crowd pleaser through the centuries like Pride & Prejudice to do the job. Though Wolf didn’t tie this play directly to “next” in the season’s theme, it does present a forward-thinking face, looking ahead to a world where Regency-era notions of marriage and courtship are mere historical curiosities.
SEE IT: Pride & Prejudice at Portland Center Stage, 128 NW 11th Ave., 503-445-3700, pcs.org/pride-prejudice. 7:30 pm Wednesday–Saturday, 2 pm matinees Saturday, Sunday and select Thursdays, Sept. 27–Oct. 25. $25–$100, pay what you will and $5 Arts for All available. All ages.
