January 2007

Dear Subscriber:

HAPPY NEW YEAR! I hope that 2007 finds you well-rested and still reveling in the special joys of the holidays. We had great fun celebrating with the light-hearted parody The Musical of Musicals—The Musical! and now look forward to sharing the razor-sharp, wonderfully clever social commentary of George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House with you. Though first published in 1919, this work is unsettlingly contemporary in its portrayal of the overly self-involved leisure class and plays as if Shaw is drawing his sights on modern America as much as 20th-century Europe. In classic Shavian fashion, this gifted playwright interjects slicing social observations on business, politics and the eternal quest for marital bliss into brilliantly written witty conversations held among a host of wonderfully quirky and opinionated characters, making it possible to swallow the curative pill before we realize that we have even been taken to the doctor. Twists and turns of phrases moving from comedy, to irony, to romance, to social commentary—can all take place in one speech. What results is a piece that surges with its own unique energy, born out of a combination of masterful word play and carefully orchestrated comedy. The shenanigans of the maid, deceptive business practices of CEOs and continual shifting of partners and allegiances in this household might just as easily be seen on The Apprentice or CNN Headline News. 

SO IT IS INTO THIS deliciously vacuous landscape of English countryside estates that Shaw places his fictitious Heartbreak House, a great rolling ship of a home that rides the tides of impending war with impunity as its inhabitants play at their petty games of matchmaking, moneygrubbing, philosophizing and philandering. At the helm is Captain Shotover, a relic of a bygone era who sees the rocks ahead for his ship but realizes that unless he can change the indifferent mindset of his crew, his actions will only postpone the crash, not prevent it. Two of his chief resistors are his Bohemian daughter, Hesione Hushabye, and her playboy husband, Hector. Their excesses in openness are matched only by the extremes of manners found in Hesione’s estranged sister Lady Utterword, whose propriety favors the letter over the spirit of the law. Juxtaposed against this amusingly dysfunctional family are Mazzini Dunn and his daughter, Ellie, who appear to be earnest, well-intentioned people, rendered ineffectual by the atrophied environment in which they live. Joining this eclectic mix is “Boss” Mangan, a businessman whose success has come at the expense of many others, one of whom is Mazzini. Interestingly, Mangan is also a potential mate for Ellie. Throughout the evening, the house bucks and reels with the dramatic couplings and uncouplings of this group as they pursue in turns each other, status and the social upper hand. So consumed with culture, money and gratification are they, that their only response to a middle-of-the-night air raid is one of disappointment at its passing. In their over-stimulated, under-achieving drawing room world, this brush with death is the closest they have come to sentient living in some time. They have reached the sensual saturation point and are no longer able or willing to feel or act on anything that is not either immediately gratifying or terrifying.

THIS IS, QUITE ARGUABLY, a direct result of Shaw’s having witnessed the horrors of World War I. Acts One and Two of the play were written before the onset of the conflict, but the work was completed after 1917. As Cary M. Mazer of the University of Pennsylvania wrote as guest dramaturg for The People’s Light Theatre’s 1998 production:

In Shaw’s other plays, there is a sense that the world can be changed, that we have been put on this planet (by what Shaw calls “The Life Force”) in order to change it, and that we can be empowered to do so if only we can open our eyes and see ourselves and the world more clearly. The World War changed that.  Shaw never wavered in his belief that the world can and should be changed. But he despaired of our ability to see clearly or to act on what we see. The war offered proof positive that the current systems of government and finance had failed, just as an outbreak of deadly infection offers proof that a hospital has neglected its sanitation. But he couldn’t make his contemporaries, friends and foes alike, see that their own belief systems and institutions had made the war inevitable, and he lost his faith that anyone could learn from the apocalypse to bring about a saner world order afterwards.

Heartbreak House is Shaw’s play about the war, even though the war is never mentioned and (until late in the play) never makes its presence felt.  He set the play, not in the world of plutocrats and government ministers (though representatives from those worlds wander into the house), but among the educated, cultured, leisure classes, what one idealistic character admiringly identifies as “very charming people, most advanced, unprejudiced, frank, humane, unconventional, democratic, free thinking and everything that is delightful to thoughtful people.”  The “Bohemians” who live in Heartbreak House aren’t thinkers or artists; they’re what the British call “amateurs” (literally “lovers”), people who pride themselves in knowing about, and being able to talk about, the latest idea and the latest work of art… And they use all this talk to break one another’s hearts—those among them, at least, who have hearts to break. Like the characters in the plays by Chekhov (which served as Shaw’s model for Heartbreak House, subtitled A Fantasia in the Russian Manner of English Themes), they ask questions about themselves that they don’t have the tools to answer, singularly pursuing their hopes and aspirations and desperate emotional needs while the cataclysmic events of the world pass them by, like the rumble of distant thunder on the horizon.

WE ARE DELIGHTED to have veteran Rep and Shaw director John Going back to direct this powerful and entertaining piece. Thomas Carson (Major Barbara) returns as Captain Shotover, along with Rep favorite Paul DeBoy as Hector Hushabye and Andrea Cirie (A Flea in Her Ear) as Lady Utterword. Also making return appearances are Frank Lowe and Matt Bradford Sullivan, and they are joined by new friends Ruth Eglsaer, Carole Healey, Curt Karibalis and Donna Weinsting. John Ezell has designed the dazzling, eclectic set while Elizabeth Covey perfectly captures the wide array of personalities in costume and Dennis Parichy traces the house’s journey into night with light. 

OUR SECOND STUDIO Theatre production, Caryl Churchill’s A Number, opens January 17th. This is a provocative piece that shows a man grappling with the discovery that he has had his son cloned 21 times, raising some very thorny questions. Not unlike Samuel Beckett, I think, Ms. Churchill’s sparse style enables her to say a great deal in a minimum of words. The production plays at about an hour—and because of the nature of the issues raised, there will post-performance discussions after virtually every show. We are quite fortunate to have Anderson Matthews playing the father and Jim Butz portraying the various versions of the cloned son. Susan Gregg directs with set design by Narelle Sissons, lighting by Mark Wilson and costumes by Clyde Ruffin.     

WE HOPE THAT you will join us both upstairs on the Mainstage and downstairs in the Studio this month as we produce two radically different but equally compelling works. Shaw will make you alternately laugh and think, while Churchill will provide you with hours of lively discussion on a very timely and intricate issue.

See you at the theatre,

Steven Woolf
Artistic Director