DRIVEN BY WEALTH: Poole and Colonna. |
George Bernard Shaw was the cleverest essayist in the history of theater. He had such a wonderful facility for dressing up notions, crotchets, and the occasional well-developed idea, standing them on their feet and shoving them onto the stage. Major Barbara may not be the most compellingly instructive of these walking talking heads, but if anyone can bring the title character and her contentious cohorts to convincing life, 2nd Story Theatre can (through April 22).
Barbara (Christin Goff) is a major in the Salvation Army, as much a soft-hearted idealist as her father is a hard-hearted businessman. They are both extreme examples of their types: she’s commercing in souls, and he’s literally a merchant of death. The corporation of Andrew Undershaft (Bob Colonna) has supplied generations of combatants around the world with such weapons as new, improved disappearing rampart cannons.
Since Shaw was one of the most prominent socialists of his time, we know where his sentiments are. But here he has the smarts to place speeches about the 1905 plight of the downtrodden not in the mouth of a politician or social rabble-rouser but a devout Christian. If he couldn’t rely on middle-class Anglican audiences meeting him halfway, he would descend to their level.
For modern audiences not interested in debates about Christian morality, this is perhaps the least interesting of the half-dozen or so Shaw plays frequently staged. (For those who are interested, disappointment waits in the wings as Shaw eventually shows even the piously high-minded to be hypocrites.) The second of the three acts takes place in front of a Salvation Army soup kitchen, and the play pivots there on an interminable, psychologically naïve case study of soul-saving. More about that later.
Of far more interest is the tangle of antagonistic relationships that comprise the Undershaft family. Munitions magnate Andrew has been entirely out of the life of his son and two daughters, but now that the latter are of marriageable age, their mother, the upper-class Lady Britomart Undershaft (Lynn Colinson), is concerned about their financial futures. The young heiresses have been latched onto by two young men who couldn’t support a couple of Corgis in proper style.
The beau of Sarah (Maryellen Brito) is the frivolous Charles Lomax (Kyle Maddock), who will be a millionaire himself but not for another 10 years, when his inheritance comes to him. Lady Undershaft thinks that Barbara could have the most brilliant career of them all, but her older daughter fired her maid and went to live on a pound a week at the mission. There she was latched onto by Adolphus Cusins (Patrick Poole), a poor teacher of Greek who later openly admits to her father that it was opportunity rather than love that attracted him to a potentially wealthy wife.
Collinson’s Lady Undershaft is the one steady flame amidst all the blustering, windy words around them, as everyone justifies themselves and their shaky moral positions. Like English society itself, she knows what she wants and how to get it. She also gets to deliver plenty of Shaw’s biting putdowns. (“That’s enough, Charles. Speak of something suited to your mental capacity.”)
She summons Andrew after an absence of decades, and embarrassed amusement results when he can’t even recognize his children. Son Stephen (Dillon Medina) is his third choice for that designation, after the two prospective sons-in-law. Stephen is soon in for a greater insult when his father insists on continuing a family (and corporate) tradition. As had been done for several generations, the patriarch was adopted as a foundling by the previous Andrew Undershaft and trained to take over the company. So he in turn is obliged to disinherit Stephen and find some orphan cruel enough to become a sound businessman.
The play presents enough ruthlessness and bad judgment to stock a dozen boardrooms, as Shaw proceeds not to raise one argument above another but rather to wish plague on both houses: hypocritical religiosity and conscience-incapacitating capitalism. Barbara sees that guilt has softened the resistance of a brutal wife beater named Bill Walker (played with restrained ferocity by T.J. Paolino), perhaps enough to save him. But her father can’t help but provide an object lesson by corrupting the head of the mission with an enormous donation. Walker, seeing that these pious Christians will take blood money if the amount is enough, is now an embittered lost cause.
The ideas set forth in Major Barbara aren’t Shaw’s most interesting or astute. Directed by Ed Shea, however, they certainly are well acted out by this talented 2nd Story troupe.
