Review
of Misalliance
from
the Washington Post
by Peter Marks
October 10, 2003
'Misalliance': A Perfect Crash Landing
BALTIMORE -- The modern age is christened with a bang in Center Stage's
exceptional revival of George Bernard Shaw's "Misalliance." Into the
roof of an English country house slams an early-model airplane, a mishap that
not only inflicts significant trauma on a skylight but also concretely
establishes the clash at the heart of Shaw's juicy comedy of social upheaval.
As with every other risible twist in the play, the crash is handled with
hilarious dexterity by director Irene Lewis and her crack design team. The noise
of an approaching plane, expertly approximated by sound designer David Budries,
rumbles across the theater; the nose of the aircraft breaks through the ceiling
and remains dangling onstage for the entire second act.
The accident is traditionally an opportunity for a virtuoso bit of stagecraft in
"Misalliance"; it can also seem gimmicky and overwhelm the play. It's
a measure of this production's agility that the plane's flight path goes so
wrong so rightly. In virtually every way, in fact, this "Misalliance"
has been engineered for success, from Tony Straiges's splendidly sunny rendering
of an Edwardian conservatory to the solidly comic performances of an ensemble
that gives Shaw's memorable epigrams the crisp timing they require. It is all,
to borrow a phrase, positively spiffing.
The plane drops out of the sky as a kind of visitor from the future as Shaw
imagined it back at the time of the play's opening in 1910, when air travel was
the new thing. The crash throws into turmoil the tranquil, orderly household of
John Tarleton (Peter Van Norden), a pillar of 19th-century commerce --
undergarments are his line -- and offers a hint of the brassier, mechanized age
that is about to transform everything.
More to the point, the arrival of this new era augurs a fundamental shift in the
social order -- the metier of "Misalliance." The play is aswirl with
20th-centuryisms like feminism and socialism, as embodied by the various
characters: There is, for instance, a young woman, Tarleton's daughter Hypatia
(Stacy Ross), who yearns to be free of the rigid social structure that confines
her to the role of hothouse flower. Also on hand is an embittered, gun-toting,
young working stiff (Carson Elrod), who holds nothing so dear as the dream of
tearing down the oppressive capitalist hierarchy.
This play of ideas -- sexual, economic, scientific -- posits an Old World
governed by convention that, like the Tarletons' ceiling, is cracking up.
Though Shaw is often accused of windiness, Lewis's fluid production demonstrates
that in the right hands his language can feel more modern than some contemporary
writers'. When you listen to Tarleton making the case for the rights of older
women to cosmetically alter their appearance to look younger, he sounds as if
he's speaking from the offices of a Park Avenue plastic surgeon. And when the
Polish aviatrix with the mouthful of a name, Lina Szczepanowska (Natalija
Nogulich), expounds on her risk-taking, libertine lifestyle, her words might
have been lifted from an article in Ms. or Vogue.
Shaw's original idea for the title of "Misalliance" -- "Just
Exactly Nothing" -- suggests the playwright wondered whether this was all
drivel. "If you want to argue," a character declares early on,
"go over to the Congregationalist minister's." Shaw, in fact, reserves
the nastiest portrait for the play's most cerebral character, Bentley Summerhays
(Andrew Weems), a weak, whiny crybaby. Yet it's a mistake to think that the play
is about everything and nothing. The long underrated "Misalliance" is
no dreary polemic.
In the Center Stage incarnation, it's a hardy, heady situation comedy with an
array of provocative types who, delightfully, live to get under one another's
skins.
The characters are models of hypocrisy -- they're what they seem, and the
opposite, too. "Paradoxes are the only truths," Tarleton remarks
prophetically. He's as much of a paradox as the others, a salesman with the
pretensions of a philosopher and proclivities of a Hugh Hefner. Van Norden makes
a wonderfully exotic Tarleton, quoting Chesterton with the same glint in the eye
he flashes when a beautiful young thing crosses his path. As his old friend Lord
Summerhays, George Morfogen, finds both the mournful rectitude and the
inextinguishable wild side of the man, who like his son Bentley is in love with
Hypatia. Weems is irritatingly spot-on as Bentley, whose ill-fated engagement to
Hypatia gives the play its title.
Much of the action revolves around, well, almost exactly nothing: the pursuit by
various men of Hypatia -- played by Ross with equal parts rose petals and iron
-- and the magical effect that Lina has on the assorted guests and family
members. Nogulich's Lina is the sexiest I've ever encountered, and it makes of
the character the femme fatale she ideally is meant to be. Trent Dawson and Eric
Sheffer Stevens are excellent as upstart members, one middle class and one upper
class, of the ascendant generation. Patricia O'Connell brings a sly survivor's
wit to Tarleton's long-suffering wife.
Threatening to hijack the whole shebang is Elrod's pathetic Julius Baker (aka
Gunner), an office cashier who for obscure reasons sneaks into the house to
shoot Tarleton and wilts uproariously in the torrent of words (and tumbler of
gin) he encounters. The poker-faced Elrod delivers a marvelous physical
performance, the sort that marks an actor with comedy in his DNA.
Candice Donnelly dresses them all terrifically, especially Lina in her sparkly
circus tights. Under Lewis's Big Top, the Shavian carnival is open for business,
in all its riotous glory.
Misalliance, by George Bernard Shaw. Directed by Irene Lewis.
Lighting, Mimi Jordan Sherin; speech consultant, Wendy Waterman. Approximately 2
hours 45 minutes. Through Nov. 3 at Center Stage, 700 N. Calvert St., Baltimore.
Call 410-332-0033 or visit www.centerstage.org.
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