GREAT EXPECTATIONS,
OR GREAT DECEPTIONS?

Miranda Jonte and playwright John Minigan
turn Dickens into the subject of a witty
and compelling literary cold case

Despite the broken air-conditioning on a hot and sticky night, Miranda Jonte kept me engaged and curious with her spirited portrayal of both a literary sleuth and one of literature’s iconic characters in (re)Dressing Miss Havisham at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre. Jonte collaborated with playwright John Minigan to create this production, directed by Peter Sampieri and commissioned by Back Porch Theater for Boston Playwrights’ Theatre’s New Play Incubator Series.

Jonte begins the play by pulling white dust covers off several pieces of Victorian-era furniture scattered about the black-box stage. She removes a white wedding dress from a dummy seated before a mirrored dressing table and begins discussing Miss Havisham from Great Expectations. Charles Dickens, Jonte argues, did not merely create a memorable literary figure in Havisham; he created what became the archetype of the spinster or “old maid,” an unmarried woman in her forties living an isolated and unhappy life. After casting the dummy aside, Jonte slips into the white dress herself and declares, “the most obvious thing Charles Dickens got wrong was the white wedding dress.”

She explains that in the 1790s — the period in which Miss Havisham was supposedly jilted by her fiancé and thereafter refused to remove her wedding gown — British women of Havisham’s class did not wear white wedding dresses. (Havisham is, after all, the daughter of a successful brewery owner.) White gowns only became fashionable after photographs of Queen Victoria in a white wedding dress circulated widely in 1854. What initially feels like an autobiographical TED Talk gradually deepens into something more layered as Jonte recounts heading off to Chico State intending to pursue criminal investigation — a field devoted to understanding character, motive, and behavior. But an acting class changes her trajectory, revealing theater as another way to examine those same human impulses.

The white wedding dress becomes a “hinky” — an inconsistency that raises suspicion and casts doubt on the larger narrative. Jonte constructs a kind of murder board, pinning up photographs and documents tracing Dickens’s life during the writing of Great Expectations. At the time, Dickens was leaving his wife Catherine, then in her forties and the mother of his ten children, for the actress Ellen Ternan, who was only eighteen. Many friends and admirers were appalled not only by Dickens’s abandonment of Catherine, but by reports that he attempted to have her committed to an asylum. The parallels to Miss Havisham become increasingly difficult to ignore.

Jonte transitions seamlessly between Havisham — speaking in a British accent — and Miranda, a contemporary American woman navigating an acting career and life as an unmarried but decidedly not unhappy woman in her forties. She is consistently engaging to watch as she shifts identities while gradually building her case against Dickens. Minigan’s script remains intelligent and playful throughout, and Jonte’s performance carries the audience toward a genuinely surprising conclusion. It is unfortunate that the climactic final image was not fully visible from my front-row seat; because the action occurs between seating rows, the heads of other patrons blocked my view. Still, that imperfect visibility feels oddly appropriate for a play built around questioning what Charles Dickens — and the rest of us — choose to see, distort, or overlook about women like Miss Havisham.

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photos by Bob Tucker/Focal Point Studios

(re)Dressing Miss Havisham
Boston Playwrights’ Theatre
949 Commonwealth Ave. in Boston
75 minutes, no intermission
ends on May 24, 2026
for tickets ($12-$35), call 617.353.5443 or visit Boston Playwrights’ Theatre

for more shows, visit Theatre in Boston

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