THEATER REVIEW: "Heartbreak House" ★★½ Through June 26 at Writers’ Theatre, 325 Tudor Court, Glencoe; Running time: 2 hours, 50 minutes; Tickets: $45-65 at 847-242-6000 or writerstheatre.org
Of the Shavian masterworks, few are as challenging to stage as “Heartbreak House,” surely George Bernard Shaw's least characteristic work and a 1919 piece that requires us to spend three hours in the company of self-indulgent people, all in service of a metaphor that lets Shaw point out what he saw as the European chattering classes' multifarious failures in the era leading up to World War I, most notably a tendency to keep on fiddling, indifferently, while the countryside around them bursts into flames.
Most Shaw plays are debates. This one is a parable. And Writers' Theatre in Glencoe is the current pulpit, with William Brown directing the sermon.
That's not to say “Heartbreak House” is without vivid characterizations. On the contrary, Shaw gathered a clutch of fascinating figures at the country estate of Captain Shotover (played by John Reeger). There's the eccentric old salt himself — a wacky inventor but no fool — and his two dangerously Bohemian daughters, Hesione Hushabye (Karen Janes Woditsch) and Lady Ariadne Utterword (Tiffany Scott), who entertain themselves with various men, including Hesione's hubby Hector Hushabye (Martin Yurek), a shallow fellow of broad appeal.
The main order of business here, though, concerns a young visitor from the less-monied class named Ellie Dunn (Atra Asdou), who arrives with her decent-but-struggling father Mazzini (Kareem Bandealy) and must decide whether or not to marry the rather brutish industrialist Boss Mangan (John Lister), a man whom she does not love but will (she thinks) offer her money and security.
This play has a great deal to say, of course, and I've long been compelled by Shaw's career-long fascination with the relationship between morality and power; more specifically, his basic contention that's there's not much use spending your life doing the right thing if what you are doing has little influence on the world at large. Progressives have long had a complicated relationship with the acquisition of power. Nobody understood that better than Shaw.
In Brown's production, the Dunns are re-cast as from India, replete with saris and accents. That's an interesting choice, although it does make some of the lines in the play sound strange — the people who gather at the Shotover home are, you might say, a gently racist lot, making several derogatory references to persons of other races. You have to wonder why they appear not even to notice the ethnicity of their guests. Still, I think that choice would be fine if the Dunns had retained their place within the all-important class structure of the play. But they don't. Asdou, who plays Ellie as a rather elegant and refined young woman, seems to miss her penniless gal's humble origins, which means that the stakes that surround her big decision don't rise as they should. You feel that this Ellie would be fine either way, frankly, and thus may as well have a husband she loves.
You don't fully see the argument (timely, given the Royal Wedding) that Boss Mangan is her one chance to both assert and take of herself.
This is certainly a visually gorgeous and exceedingly articulate production. Keith Pitts' spectacular set transforms the Women's Library Club into a verdant garden, and it avoids the trap of reaching for too many visual metaphors. Rachel Anne Healy's costumes are beautiful. And indeed, as a study of individuals, Brown's production is very successful. Woditsch, an actress whom Brown invariably uses to spectacular effect, provides the zest and energy of this production through her truly luminous Hesione, a portrait of an unrepentant sentimentalist. There is also a very wry performance from Scott. Reeger is in top form, approaching a point in his career where he really could take on some of the great senior roles (Lear, Prospero and the like), and his Shotover is a fine prequel of what he could do.
But when it comes to seeing this crew as a group who march together into the Apocalypse, and when it comes to seeing the Shavian woods rather than just the idle trees, the production is somewhat less convincing.
The cast does not fully cohere and sometimes looks more comfortable in the individual frames that Brown provides. And although Lister does take some real risks, the show otherwise lacks personal revelation. In the best, shiver-inducing productions of “Heartbreak House,” you always sense that Hermione and her lovely, sensualist crew suspect that the sand on which they fiddle is shifting. They just prefer to delude themselves. And who does not?