And she’s currently at work on adapting another Austen novel, with plans to dramatize all seven before she’s done. Though she’s tackled only S&S and P&P thus far, there have been more than a dozen productions of her work since 2014, with many more to come: She’s on American Theatre’s Top 20 Most-Produced Playwrights list this season, with nine productions slated for 2017-18. 15, with Hamill starring as the perspicacious Lizzy Bennet.
Her adaptation of Pride and Prejudice premiered this summer at Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, which is also co-producing the show at Primary Stages in NYC, Nov. But though she’s never taken a playwriting class, Hamill has a whole new wheelhouse-indeed, she stands at the helm of a nationwide resurgence of Jane Austen stage adaptations. Hamill, who received a BFA in acting from Ithaca College, was in her wheelhouse onstage, acting as the self-dramatizing Marianne in the play’s world premiere. It was a critical and box-office hit, and the production, directed by Eric Tucker, was mounted again in 2016, and it’s next up at American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., Dec. Sense and Sensibility, Hamill’s first full-length play, premiered in a production by New York City theatre company Bedlam at the Sheen Center in Manhattan, in a staging that starred, as planned, Hamill and Nichols as Marianne and Elinor Dashwood, respectively. “I was so poor at the time, and I really didn’t want to lose that $100. “I bet her a hundred bucks,” says Hamill. This gambit to add “playwright” to her résumé was further spurred by a wager. Hamill says that when the two passed a roadside diner called “Marianne’s,” she took it as a promising sign for her new playwriting venture. Hamill said she’d play the impressionable Marianne Dashwood, and Nichols the eldest Dashwood sister, Elinor, in the play’s first production. While traveling to Vermont a few years ago, Hamill told her car companion, fellow actor Andrus Nichols, that she was going to pen her first play, an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility.
Kate Hamill found inspiration, as many do, on a road trip.