Theater Review: Grapefruit Lab and Teacup Gorilla’s ‘Jane/Eyre’ Puts a Modern, Queer Take on a Literary Classic

I first came to discover Teacup Gorilla and Miriam Suzanne years ago after wandering into a concert of theirs at the Lion’s Lair. When I used to live closer to that wonderful punk dive bar on Colfax, I would frequently stop in for shows without knowing who was playing. On stage, I saw the bassist and vocalist Miriam Suzanne, who was apparently playing one of her first shows as an out trans woman, and from across the venue we had an odd moment of trying to clock each other as trans women from afar.

After running into Miriam at a few other events, I started to follow her band and her subsequent productions with Grapefruit Labs. From Teacup Gorilla’s moody post-punk to Grapefruit Labs’ thoughtful queer theatrical productions, I’ve been a fan of their artistic output over the years. I even caught their queer adaptation of Jane/Eyre when they first mounted the production in 2018, which also featured music from Teacup Gorilla. Now, seven years later, they’ve not only remounted the production, but Teacup Gorilla have finally come to release their first full-length album as a group, Jane/Eyre: No Net Ensnares Me, which features all the music from the stage production. At the intersection between theater and music, between classic feminist literature and modern queer post-punk, comes a unique experience that could only have come from the brilliant mind of Suzanne.

In Grapefruit Lab’s production of Jane/Eyre, the narrative is complex, with multiple narrators telling the story. First, there’s the novel’s author, Charlotte Brontë, who originally published the novel under the gender-ambiguous moniker Currer Bell, leading actor and Grapefruit Lab co-founder Julie Rada to play the role of the author in a gender-ambiguous suit and pants. Despite being the narrator of the story, Rada also fills in other roles as necessary, most notably the problematic and otherworldly character of Bertha, a character that the modern, progressive adaptation has to grapple with considering her depiction in the original novel is both racist and sexist.

Then Suzanne herself and Lindsey Pierce share the role of Jane, with Suzanne being an elder Jane looking back on her life, serving as a second narrator, and Pierce playing Jane as she’s experiencing her life. Pierce, at times, picks up a smart phone and speaks directly into it, serving as the play’s third narrator. The final cast member in the show is Joan Bruemmer-Holden, who holds no fixed role and instead adopts several different roles throughout the show from Aunt Reed to Mr. Rochester to Diana Rivers.

Much of the play involves the four actors pantomiming props and coming up with innovative ways to represent scenes, moving sparse props around to reconfigure the stage into different setups. There’s a lot of theater magic going on here, forcing the audience to use their imagination, but it works exceptionally well if the audience is willing to come along for the ride.

The fact that Bruemmer-Holden plays so many of the other roles in the play, including Jane’s primary love interest, Mr. Rochester, adds a queer dimension to the plot. But the story also makes certain relationships that Jane has with other female characters much queerer than Brontë ever intended them to be. Jane’s relationships with both Helen Burns and Diana Rivers, both played by Bruemmer-Holden, are made out to be romantic in ways that can easily be interpreted by a modern audience reading the novel but were likely unintentional in the 19th century.

One of my favorite things about Grapefruit Labs’ production of this story is that it patently ignores the ending from the novel. While Brontë certainly wanted to make a character in Jane Eyre who was a strong, independent woman regardless of whether she marries a man, the novel (spoiler alert for a nearly-200-year-old-book) ends with Jane finally marrying Mr. Rochester when he becomes humbled by deformity and Jane has become independent from an inheritance. The novel certainly wouldn’t have succeeded in the 19th century without the obligatory marriage at the end, but anyone who reads the novel in 2025 can easily tell that Jane is better off without Rochester. Rochester is a toxic man who imprisoned his first wife because he became ashamed of her, largely due to racism. It’s really hard to find a way to make him redeemable, as hard as Brontë tries by 19th century standards.

Spoiler alert for the play, but when Mr. Rochester proposes to Jane at the end, she shrugs off the proposal and promises to be his caretaker, which is still more than he deserves, but never responds to his request to be his wife. Elder Jane even points out in dialogue that this isn’t the ending of the book, to which the younger Jane simply says, “Best I can do.” And, while purists might balk at changing the ending to a novel that’s over 150 years old and considered a key part of the British literary canon, you can’t mount a modernized, progressive, queer-friendly version of this story that concludes with Jane essentially marrying her abuser.

Teacup Gorilla’s music is essential to this production, yet it would be odd to call this a musical. Rather, there’s a musical group that acts as almost a Greek chorus to enhance the story and serve as almost a fourth narrator to the story. The only time I disagreed with the use of the band was the weird moment during Mr. Rochester’s courtship of Blanche Ingram where the band launches into a cover of Pat Benatar’s 1980 classic “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” while cast members hand out cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon to audience members. It feels like an odd musical non-sequitur in the midst of a production that otherwise focuses on original music. Dameon Merkl, who is not a member of Teacup Gorilla, joins the band for these performances to add his deep, thundering voice and gothic sense of storytelling to an already excellent performance.

Jane Eyre is one of my favorite classic British novels, and I’ve often said (although I’ve softened on this over the years) that I’ll take the Brontës (yes, even Anne) over Jane Austen any day. Suzanne said in the materials in her press kit that one of her favorite parts about the novel is that, “The novel has a defiant attitude from page one of the preface, refusing to be set aside. Brontë and Jane don’t just have a story; they have an agenda.” Grapefruit Labs brings their own queer agenda to the story, and the flavor of her band’s own dark poetry and post-punk musical stylings. This is distinctly their unique take on Brontë’s story, but the brilliance of Brontë’s original novel manages to shine through nonetheless. Altogether, it’s a brilliant retelling of a classic story for a modern, queer audience from a modern, queer storyteller.

Rating: 95/100

Jane/Eyre runs though February 1 at Buntport Theater in Denver. Tickets are available here. The Teacup Gorilla album, Jane/Eyre, is available for order here.

Read my full review of the album at New Noise Magazine.

Photo courtesy of Grapefruit Labs