A library is an ideal place to discover literature. On Monday, area residents will be able to see an author come to life.
“Discovering Austen,” a one-woman show, will be presented at 1 p.m. Monday at the Shawano City-County Library. The play is one of a series of free events in the Library @ 7 series.
“The play itself is about an actress getting ready to perform a Jane Austen play,” library director Kristie Hauer said. “It’s her internal dialogue with herself, getting ready to go out on stage and play her.”
Kristin Hammargren, a Minnesota native, wrote the show and first performed it at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2012. The play is being performed through a grant from the Wisconsin Humanities Council.
Hammargren wrote the show while she was pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in acting. She said in a phone interview Friday that she was originally looking for one-woman shows to use as part of her thesis but couldn’t find one that appealed to her.
“There was one about Emily Dickinson called ‘The Belle of Amherst,’ and I really liked it, but I felt it just wasn’t for me,” Hammargren said. “I’m not as passionate about Emily Dickinson as I am about Jane Austen. That put me on the path of thinking, what if I made up a one-woman show about Jane Austen?”
It took about seven months to write the first draft of the show for her thesis, but Hammargren didn’t stop there. It took her more than three years to perfect the script that she now performs at libraries, schools and other venues throughout the Midwest.
Jane Austen, best known for her early 19th century romantic fiction, is one of the widest read English writers. Her books include “Sense and Sensibility,” “Pride and Prejudice” and “Mansfield Park.”
“I’ve always really enjoyed her work, but I didn’t know that much about her,” Hammargren said. “The more that I looked into who she was, there wasn’t really one story to tell, and people have different opinions about her. She’s been presented in many different ways in history.”
Hauer said the play was a departure from the usual lectures and presentations that are part of the local Library @ 7, but after talking with Hammargren, she felt it would be a good fit for the series’ goal of engaging readers and other library patrons.
“We’ve tried to do a variety of different program to be the most appealing we can be to our community residents,” Hauer said.
Hammargren is able to work well with an audience and be captivating, according to Hauer.
“My hope is the audience will walk away wanting to read Jane Austen,” Hammargren said. can trim if need to … “There are often people who never read her work or read ‘Pride and Prejudice’ in high school and hated it. I do present a lot of pieces from her books and some of her letters in the show, and I think, if you’re a skeptic, you walk away thinking, ‘Oh, that is good,’ and (Austen) really is clever and was really an amazing writer.”
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