THE CREATOR OF DIY AUSTEN DRAMA ‘SANDITON SEASON 2 - PARKER BROTHERS BUILD THE BOARDWALK’, CAROL LISA O’BRIEN, SHARES THE STORY BEHIND THIS INNOVATIVE PANDEMIC PROJECT

Narrated by Jane Austen’s fifth great niece, Caroline Jane Knight (our Founder & Chair), Sanditon Season 2 - Parker Brothers Build The Boardwalk, is a 10-part reimagining of the unfinished Sanditon story by Jane Austen, told in digital theatre form all filmed and produced by the power of Zoom. Now showing exclusively on the Jane Austen Literacy Foundation YouTube channel (scroll to bottom of page to see the trailer)

Sanditon I: The Prelude to Lockdown

In January 2020, along with many other Austen fans in the USA, I was elated to hear that Jane’s last unfinished work, Sanditon, was to appear on Masterpiece Theater. What a lovely way to spend wintry Sunday evenings! When the season concluded in February, without a happy ending, fans were dissatisfied to say the least; to find that season two had been cancelled was insufferable!

In March, I was asked to stay home from my part-time caregiving job, as my patient’s family decided to do a strict quarantine. In my newly acquired spare time, I began to toss around the idea of writing a continuation for the Sanditon TV series. At the same time of year when Miss Austen laid her pen down due to ill health, I picked mine up as a consequence of the ill health of the world. As I jotted down ideas, I asked myself how Jane would have resolved Andrew Davies’s plot.

Then, like a few thousand other Austen fans, I discovered fan clubs on Facebook (FB). I loved reading the posts of people who were just as obsessed with her novels as I was! I was still lonely though; staying home day after day in grungy March weather drove me to pursue relationships more than an introvert usually would.

In April, I invited women from my small group at church to a Zoom tea party for which I made a chocolate orange cake. As my husband was away, my son not interested, I had to eat it all myself. A travesty! I posted a picture to my fellow Janeites on FB and received 352 likes and 61 comments; heady stuff for one who rarely posted.

From this post, I met new friends, who expressed interest in having Austen-themed Zoom tea parties. We dressed up and had a blast; so happy to have found one another! My favorite topics of conversation were Jane’s Sanditon fragment, the TV series, and conjecturing where Jane would have taken it. I began to think of using Zoom as a means of producing a play.

In July, I signed up with Archive of Our Own, a fanfiction website, where several writers were already penning their own endings to Sanditon and then posting about them on Twitter and the Sanditon FB clubs. I had dabbled in creative writing but had never published or posted anything longer than a poem. The Sanditon FB clubs proved to be an encouraging environment for fanfic writers. I knew that if I wrote an ending of my own, there were people who would be happy to read it and to even perform it. So I began. On two sheets of lined notebook paper, I plotted out the scenes.

Through the summer, the writing progressed. Drawing from twenty-six years of saturation in Austen’s written word and the movie adaptions, the words flowed out of the characters once they knew where the plot was headed. For further inspiration, I listened to The Letters of Jane Austen on YouTube and The Regency Years by Robert Morrison via my phone’s Audible app.  As I found applicable quotes in Austen’s letters and the original Sanditon fragment, I wove them into the script.

By November, it was time to do a casting call, so I turned to social media again. Having posted three episodes on “Archive of Our Own,” or “AO3,” I put out a request in both AO3 and the FB fan clubs, asking for willing performers who, like Col. Fitzwilliam said of Mr. Darcy, would be glad for company on a Sunday evening when they had nothing to do. I received several replies and two referrals for professional narrators, resulting in ten women and two men. Only TWO men! This would not do! I messaged a friend from high school, now living across the country but accessible by FB, and he kindly agreed to be my third actor in the eight-week series. Not only that, but he brought along his daughter and called on his friends to join us.

From December on, the cast expanded to friends of friends, family of the cast, theater buddies, and my tea party cronies with whom I began lockdown. Caroline Jane Knight responded to my request for her involvement and offered her services as narrator. Caroline thought the series would provide some much needed entertainment for the Jane Austen Literacy Foundation community worldwide and could even help raise money for literacy projects from YouTube advertising.

The fun began in January, 2021, recording on Sunday and releasing it the following weekend. Sundays became our focal point each week where we heard the words spoken for the first time and saw what would happen to all the characters. We laughed out loud while learning from the British actors how to pronounce words their way; the name “Worcester” proving the most difficult!

The actors’ creativity in above-waist costuming for the Zoom camera provided more reasons to chuckle!  Our leading man tied a tea-towel into a cravat and others followed suit—one with a dinner napkin/serviette cravat, and servants using dish towels as aprons and kerchiefs. The ultra-rich villainess, Mrs. Campion, raided a Dollar Tree store for jewelry and a tiara. The progressive stonemason-turned-architect elevated his style with a stovepipe hat from a local Abraham Lincoln Museum gift shop, cutting it apart to fit an adult head! But the Most Creative Wardrobe Adaption Award went to the vicar, who wore a pair of women’s white trousers as a clerical stole:

For all the problems that come with having social media at our fingertips, I was so thankful for it during the pandemic. Facebook, Zoom, Audible, AO3, and YouTube all played their part in the production of Parker Brothers Build the Boardwalk. The play is not gathering dust on some producer’s desk. The words that were in my head are already out in the world; the means of bringing a happy ending to Sanditon, and for me an especially joyous end to a difficult year.  My cup overflows, and I feel so blessed by the thirty people from four different countries who took a chance on me. Indeed, I feel happier than I deserve.

© Carol Lisa O’Brien

Writer and Director of Sanditon Season 2 - Parker Brothers Build The Boardwalk

Sanditon Season 2 - Parker Brothers Build The Boardwalk: