At the very moment director Michael Halberstam is at Lincoln Center Theater, preparing for Saturday’s New York premiere of “A Minister’s Wife” (the musical based on George Bernard Shaw’s play “Candida” that he developed at his Glencoe-based Writers’ Theatre ), another unquestionably brilliant if difficult play by Shaw has arrived at Writers’. And director William Brown has gathered a whip-smart cast and design team there to create an emotionally stinging, achingly funny, often transcendent production.
While “Heartbreak House” was Shaw’s meditation on how England calamitously “drifted” into World War I, Brown has set his production at a crucial moment during World War II — in September of 1940, shortly after the Germans began their blitz and hoped to destroy the Royal Air Force and much else. But like the play’s smart yet wholly self-absorbed and generally oblivious characters — all of whom gather at the Sussex estate of the aged and eccentric Capt. Shotover (John Reeger, wholly masterful as a man of ideas and demons) and his daughter, Hesione Hushabye (played with the most seductive wit and knowingness by Karen Janes Woditsch) — it is not until very late in this three-act play that we have any notion of the chaos in the larger world.
In fact, by all indications, the only real upheaval is that which thrives in Shotover’s rambling house and garden, where the bohemian life is in full bloom, and any and all visitors must adapt. Of course, the tattered estate (and set designer Keith Pitts’ marvelously overgrown and detailed garden world, brimming with with Chinese lanterns, rattan furniture and Oriental carpets over gravel and grass, is pure magic), is in many ways a microcosm of England. It is a ship of state on an unsteady, even perilous course, and it is packed with narcissists, nutcases, free spirits and dispirited “free love” lovers, as well as the struggling class from far-flung colonies (in this case, India), plus a robber baron and small-time thief.
The irritant in the oyster comes in the form of Ellie Dunn (Atra Asdou, a relative newcomer and a bristlingly intelligent power player), here cast as a young Anglo-Indian woman befriended by Hesione. Ellie’s father, Mazzini Dunn (the ever-wily Kareem Bandealy) is a failed businessman undone by his “benefactor,” Boss Mangan (the ideally volatile John Lister). And while Ellie is considering a match of convenience to this much older man, Hesione is hellbent on having her see the light.
Also at odds at the Shotover residence are Hesione’s feckless, skirt-chasing husband, Hector (Martin Yurek, terrific in Errol Flynn mode); her long-estranged, socially conservative, sexually predatory sister, Lady Ariadne Utterword (Tiffany Scott, in all ways to the manor born); Ariadne’s feckless lover and brother-in-law, Randall (Kevin Christopher Fox); Nurse Guinness (the ideally droll Jeannie Affelder), and the unorthodox burglar (Tim Gittings).
Rachel Anne Healy’s costumes are perfection, as is Andrew Hansen’s music and birdsong sound.
As for Shaw, all you can do is laugh, cry, listen, debate and be amazed and amused.
“There are only two classes in good society in England: the equestrian classes and the neurotic classes,” says one of his characters. You might have thought Shaw had watched the royal wedding on television.
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