A Conversation With Director Casey Sams About Clarence Brown Theatre’s ‘Sense and Sensibility’

Clarence Brown Theatre kicks off its 2025–26 season with Sense and Sensibility, Kate Hamill’s witty and modern adaptation of Jane Austen’s classic novel, on stage Sept. 17–Oct. 5. The production blends the romance and social commentary of Austen with playful, contemporary flourishes—including a chorus of “gossips” who echo today’s cultural obsession with reputation and rumor.

Ahead of opening night, director Casey Sams talked with me about why she’s excited to finally bring this show to the stage.

Why this play? Why now?

We’ve been looking at Kate Hamill’s adaptation of Sense and Sensibility for a while, because it has such great roles for our graduate students. With this current crop of grad students it felt like a wonderful opportunity for them to stretch into different territories.

It’s a period piece, but not just a period piece. This particular adaptation feels very contemporary in a lot of sensibilities. It’s got all the things you love about Jane Austen—the rich language, the unspoken romance—but it also has this herd of “gossips” running through the play, listening in on everything, watching what’s going on. So it plays with that social commentary, the tension between private lives and public perception. What people say about you, what they hear about you—it takes on a life of its own. And that’s playful, but it can also be destructive.

What’s an example of that?

Part of the story of Sense and Sensibility is that there’s a secret engagement that impacts a lot of people’s lives. In the novel, it gets revealed through two characters gossiping with one other about another character. That moment happens in the play, too, but Hamill also weaves in other moments—you see characters hiding in doorways, listening, sneaking off to pass along what they’ve heard. So it’s not through spoken dialogue, it’s through physical action.

Is the play still set in Austen’s period?

Yes. The costumes are period clothing, but we’ve added little touches to make it feel a bit more modern. For example, the gossips are always in sunglasses, peering out over things.

I’m personally a big Jane Austen fan. My father was an English professor, so I was familiar with Austen from very early on. I love that this is an adaptation written by a woman of a novel written by a woman. 

And directed by a woman! 

Yes. Austen is significant because she was one of the first novelists really telling stories from a woman’s lived perspective. Her novels are romantic and funny, but they’re also social commentary of their time. And that’s true of Kate Hamill’s adaptation too—it’s romantic and funny, but it also acknowledges all of those pressures and social structures that we still deal with today.

You and I would have read Austen 25 or 30 years ago. For some of the young women you’re working with, this may be their first experience with it, maybe other than a movie. How does it hit for this generation?

Our first two days of rehearsal we just sat around a table and read through the scenes. Then we’d stop and talk: What do you hear in this scene? Who does this remind you of? How does this connect to our current culture?

Most people—maybe not everyone, but most—have had the experience of being attracted to someone and not knowing if they’re attracted to you. What do you do in that situation? For younger, college-age actors, so much of that social interaction is happening online now in the very early stages of a relationship. So they definitely still relate, it’s just in a different format.

Reputation is a huge theme in Austen’s work.

Absolutely. A person’s reputation has a huge impact on what opportunities are available to them. In Austen’s time, especially for women, reputation was very closely guarded by themselves and their families. And yes, that was confining—young people today would recognize that immediately.

A lot of Austen’s novels are also about sisters. That’s certainly true in Pride and Prejudice and definitely in Sense and Sensibility. You have the older sister who, like a lot of older sisters, follows the rules and does what she’s supposed to do and is successful in that way, and the younger sister who is much rowdier and less worried about what other people think and more willing to take risks with both her heart and her actions. That’s where the title comes from—one is the “sense” and the other is the “sensibility.” Over the course of the play, they clash, but by the end they recognize the value in the other’s way of understanding the world. It’s not either/or—it’s both.

I wonder if you observe that in your actors, too. If they tend to identify more with one polarity or the other. 

Yes. Both of our lead actors (McKinley Merritt as Elinor Dashwood, Develyn Jayan as Marianne Dashwood) have said, Oh, this character is so much like me. I SO understand this character. That’s great, but it also creates challenges. You can’t just be yourself—you have to be the character. They’ve been doing beautiful work with that balance.

What makes this production meaningful for you?

I’m proud that this production really fulfills our mission. At the University of Tennessee and Clarence Brown Theatre, we talk about how our mission is to create high-quality, engaging theater for the East Tennessee community and to train the next generation of theater artists.

This show is really doing that. We have faculty in the cast, graduate students, undergraduates, alumni, even alumni and grad students on the design team. It’s that balance of being both an arts organization and an educational institution, and when those come together it’s incredibly satisfying.

The CBT 2025-2026 season runs from September through May and will feature six productions in the Clarence Brown Theatre, Lab Theatre and the new Jenny Boyd Theatre. CBT provides a cultural resource for both Knoxville and the greater East Tennessee community. 

To purchase tickets for an upcoming show or to view the online playbill for Sense and Sensibility, click here or call the box office at (865) 974-5161.