The “Roles” We All Play in Our Families: Who will you choose to be at your holiday table?
I walked into the play Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley a bit uncertain. My friend who bought the tickets couldn’t make it and I decided to go anyway. As a party of one. It was the first show or performance I’ve ever attended on my own (other than a Korean opera I stumbled upon at an outdoor theater during my solo-travels in Seoul). Oddly enough, it reminded me of going on a first date… with myself. I felt giddy to arrive, nervous about what to expect, and wondering what kind of looks I’d get.
The play I was about to see is a work of Jane Austen fanfiction, bringing to stage some of the famed characters so loved by Pride and Prejudice fans. While I’d read the tale at Pemberley, and remember enjoying it, my fondness stopped there. I felt hesitant, worried the story wouldn’t click for someone like me… someone who is not an Austen aficionado.
Once I began to appreciate the spaciousness of my seat, flanked by an aisle on one side and an empty chair on the other, I eased into the unfamiliarity of sitting alone. It turned out that the performance of Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley, produced by the Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company and performed at the Dairy Arts Center, absolutely charmed me. Heartfelt, poetic, and witty, the play was the perfect date.
The story is set at the Pemberley Estate, the home of Mrs. Elizabeth Darcy and Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy. As Elizabeth’s sisters — Mrs. Jane Bingley, Mrs. Lydia Wickham, and Miss. Mary Bennet — arrive, we start to recall the “role” each of them plays in their family. Jane is the beautiful and idealistic sister, while Elizabeth is the intelligent, caring, and charming one, and Lydia the frivolous and flirtatious youngest sister.
Mary, the middle of the five Bennet sisters, is the only unmarried of the bunch. Unaccustomed to pleasantries and much more enthralled with books than men, Mary is assumed to be the spinster sister who will grow old alone. The family talks of Mary’s plainness and her destined future to live with their parents for the rest of her life.
As the story evolves, we see how the sisters filter every interaction with Mary through the lens of the stories they’ve made up about her. Instead of appreciating her intelligence and appetite for accuracy, they see her as impolite and a drag. They laugh at her expense, assuming she has not progressed beyond the childlike piano skills she once had, only to find out she practices three times a day and plays Beethoven beautifully.
This left me reflecting on how I show up in my own family dynamic. I often notice that when I am with family or my oldest friends, it’s as if I have never aged. While that sounds nice in theory, to me it feels a lot like being assigned a role. I am to play the overly-sensitive, dramatic, controlling, perfectionist. Forget that I’ve spent a lot of time working on taking 100% responsibility and not personalizing the reactions of others, don’t worry that I have way less attachment to things being done perfectly. When my family or friends are looking at me through the old lens, it feels inevitable that they will find some evidence that confirms all the old stories they have about me.
Miss Bennet playwright Margot Melcon says she wanted to create the experience of the holidays, when “everybody brings their current self, and yet you also can’t help but turn into this person your family thinks you are.” In the play, Elizabeth and Jane are lamenting Lydia’s precociousness when they ask something to the effect of, “Is she always like this out in the world, or is she just more Lydia when she’s with us?”
This led me to ask… am I contributing to my family and long-time friends seeing me as my younger self? Is it possible that I may be limiting myself by assuming the role I think they’ve assigned me?
As many of us approach some extended time with family and old friends in the coming days, I wonder: What new version of myself do I want to introduce to my family and friends? Who will I choose to be at my holiday table?
If this resonates with you, here’s a fun conversation starter for a time when everyone’s gathered, perhaps around the table:
“Since most of us have known each other a really long time, I thought it could be fun if we each share one thing that has changed about us in the last few years.”
This way not only do you get to step into your new you, but you invite others to as well… maybe even discovering the ways you have been boxing your family into old versions of themselves.
And with that, I wish you happy holidays.
