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Bedlam’s minimalist staging demonstrates the power of live theater to cast a spell through acting, words, sound and spectacle, with the audience as knowing, complicit partner.

Under the direction of Eric Tucker, this gifted and energetic troupe manages to turn a 200 year old novel into a vibrant romp that keeps 21st century audiences engaged and in stitches. It is a fun evening at the theater.

All of the pieces – and some of them are quite odd and incongruent – come together in Bedlam’s Sense & Sensibility to create a marvelous vision of becoming one.

A beautifully staged and choreographed takeoff, by New York’s innovative Bedlam theatre company, on the early Jane Austen novel about two sisters navigating the seas of love.

Reading the novels of Jane Austen and seeing the characters in the Hamill-Tucker adaptation come to life onstage confirm how little human nature has changed over the course of 150 years or so, even if the methods of communication have allowed rumor, innuendo, and false news to spread further and faster.

Bedlam is deadly serious about performing quality theater, and equally serious about having fun at the same time. Those two qualities – and the talents of the cast, director Tucker and playwright Hamill – have breathed new theatrical life into classic pieces of literature, made them more accessible, and brought in new audiences to be delighted by them.

Although uproariously funny at times, the material is never played strictly for laughs, and the scenes where Elinor and Marianne have their hopes dashed are still painfully touching.

More than a gimmick, Bedlam’s free-wheeling production adds a joyous energy to Austen’s tale of love and marriage, while avoiding the fussy Masterpiece Theatre trappings that usually accompany Austen.

For those who have no prior history with either the Austen novel or a film version, Director Eric Tucker and Bedlam’s production is accessible to any and all, rolling out the story in their inimitable style.

Whereas a movie brings the camera closer to or further from the action, in this cast the action surges toward the viewer and then recedes. The result is restless and absorbing.

Marriage deals on wheels might be an apt description of Bedlam’s Sense & Sensibility. The former, of course, come courtesy of Jane Austen, who famously wrote elsewhere: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” The latter are appended by the New York-based theater troupe Bedlam, whose delightfully exuberant 2014 staging of Austen’s 1811 novel Sense and Sensibility — in a frisky adaptation by Kate Hamill, skitters and spins about the American Repertory Theater’s Loeb Drama Center playing space (through Jan. 14) like the pieces and parts of some love-racked pinball machine.

Jane Austen fans will likely adore Sense & Sensibility. It retains the heart and wit of the beloved novel. But traditionalists must keep an open mind. Yes, the show is a tribute to Austen’s analysis on proper conduct and the merits of good sense. But it also celebrates the elasticity of theater.