Allied forces
Though the only "misalliance" George Bernard Shaw cites in Misalliance is marriage between members of different classes, there are others in his sights. The one that most mystifies him is a natural one, between parents and their children. Misinterpreted as mere misanthropy when it premiered in Britain in 1910 and in the U.S. seven years later, Misalliance would finally find a worthy ally in Southern California, more than a generation after the playwright’s death in 1950.
South Coast Repertory struck gold when it first revived Misalliance in 1987, earning a half-dozen Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Awards, including one for Artistic Director Martin Benson’s staging. Now this less-admired of Shaw’s work has been re-revived (through October 10). Again positioned to open a season under Benson's direction, and featuring Ralph Funicello’s carbon copy of his earlier set (again lit by Tom Ruzika, with costumes by Maggie Morgan and Michael Roth's music), can they coax lightening to strike twice?
Yes they can.
It’s hard to see how so many missed the boat a century ago. Max Beerbohm of the Saturday Review called the characters "perfunctory," and replicas of previously introduced figures. "Only by his righteous indignation against what he takes to be mankind," he added, "is [Shaw] enabled to go on with the task of fashioning them." There was the occasional rave, of course, though Shaw may have preferred Beerbohm’s tongue-lashing to the slobbering-over he received from Henry Mackinnon Walbrook, whose Pall Mall Gazette review included this backhanded compliment: "Misalliance is . . . a caprice, the most whimsical thing in the world, a piece of nonsense almost from beginning to end, but of a nonsense having so much wit and so much sense that it never bores."
Again Benson finds the right spirit to enliven the "righteous indignation," making it great fun without making it "nonsense." The whole affair, from the sunny skies of Funicello’s birdcage-solarium set, to the energy in every performance, carbonates the Shavian dogma with theatrical Life Force. Benson’s greatest ally is the marvelous Dakin Matthews. As the family’s head and play’s tent pole, Matthews' John Tarleton is filled to bursting with the love of ideas and the finer ways of expressing them. "Read Shakespeare," he exults. "He has a word for every occasion!"
Also putting in star turns in secondary roles are JD Cullum and Kirsten Potter. As "Gunner," Cullum is an armed intruder bent on forcing Tarleton to apologize for mistreating his class and kin. As stunt-flyer Lina Szczepanowska, Potter makes the stern Pole a font of comic absurdity. One would be hard pressed to come up with two performances in the same show that, without ever the cracking of a smile, produced so much laughter.
The key to the show’s inner balance is the relationship between Tarleton and his daughter Hypatia (Melanie Lora). Teelingly, Shaw, by way of Tarleton, names Hypatia after the 4th Century woman who followed her father, Theon, into the sciences, became "the first notable woman in mathematics," and died at the hands of Christians. A martyr to reason, if you will. (Read the Encyclopedia Britannica!)
Lora’s Hypatia strikes the balance between independence from and admiration for her father. She is the heiress apparent to his ready love of fun, while her brother, John Jr. (Daniel Bess), takes after their left-brained mother (Amelia White), who bustles about the home, tending to the guests and gingerly grounding her husband’s wilder pronouncements. At 30, Hypatia is unmarried and living with her parents. But she is engaged to Bentley Summerhays (Wyatt Fenner), the wispy intellectual son of Lord Summerhays (Richard Doyle), an old military man and friend of Tarleton’s. Hypatia's unlikely vision of a mate reveals her warring hemispheres – one to stimulate her mental and carnal sides. She has not found a suitable suitor and so settled for the brainy Bentley, who can satisfy her intellectual demands.
Her salvation arrives from the heavens with the crash landing of dashing Joey Percival (Peter Katona) and his passenger, Szczepanowska. A handsome figure promising adventure, Percival quickly turns Hypatia’s head away from her fiance, while all the men onstage are smitten with the downed aviatrix. Before night, the romantic alliances will sort themselves out as Shaw works to sort out families and the societies that they build to support themselves.
In Parents and Children, the 124-page preface to Misalliance, the childless Shaw detailed his views of raising, educating and respecting our offspring. With plays and essays his only issue, he nevertheless advises us that one's children are the only proper way to pursue immortality – rebirth through "remanufacture." That obviously was not going to happen for him. Instead, his work will mark his return to us. Misalliance has now been remanufactured twice, a generation apart, here in Southern California, with its intellectual and physical demands satisfied. And that is especially satisfying for one fortunate enough to attend production with the 23-year-old daughter who was born on the morning after the 1987 production opened.
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Beware of darkness
Athol Fugard’s The Road to Mecca, currently onstage (through October 17) at San Diego Rep, is a tribute to artistic integrity and indomitability. Inspired by the story of South African sculptor Helen Martins, it is clearly fueled by Fugard’s own belief that an artist must follow a personal path lit from within.
Associate Artistic Director Todd Salovey directs the 1987 play with Kandis Chappell as Martins, Amanda Sitton as her young friend Elsa Barlow, and Armin Shimerman as the Rev. Marius Byleveld, the leader of the local church and Martin’s only remaining neighborhood friend.
Martins turned her home into a work of art, filling her yard with a gallery of odd statuary. The property became known as "Owl House," and has since become a national monument. Any of her figurines that can, raise a limb eastward, toward Mecca.
In Fugard’s interpretation, Mecca is both destination and the determination to reach it. Barlow’s road brought her to Helen years before. The statuary caught her eye and she stopped to inquire, developing a master-student dynamic with the woman she came to idolize. She would routinely make the 1600-mile round trip to visit Helen, and fill in the time between with steady correspondence.
As the play begins, Barlow arrives after three months of not visiting or writing. During that time, Helen has been increasingly frightened by weakening eyesight, mental lapses, a loss of strength in her hands, and a sense of depression intensified by her feeling of abandonment by Barlow. It has increased her alienation from the other villagers and her reliance on Marius, who believes Helen now needs the safety of a residential facility.
While Marius’ regular visits have eased Helen to accept the rare vacancy that has opened at "the home," Barlow’s silence scared her into writing a trenchant cry for help. That letter, hinting at an enveloping darkness of suicidal proportions, set Barlow on the road to investigate. She arrives just before Marius comes to retrieve Helen’s signed application for admission to the facility.
As is his custom, Fugard writes conversational dialogue that takes its time getting where it’s going. It affords the actors plenty of time to paint their characters. Here, with the action taking place in real time over a single evening, metaphors of light and darkness are employed – almost overemployed – to illuminate the fine points. Helen’s creative freedom is what is at stake here. Marius, who has lost a wife, can accept the end of the light; Barlow, who is young – and is guilty about recently opting out of motherhood – rages against any diminishing of her spirit.
Chappell, one of the West Coast’s great stage actors, doesn’t disappoint, creating a powerful and sympathetic character. What she is kept from in Salovey’s vision, is showing more of the dominating presence that earned the love and respect of both her friends. Here we have a post-glory Helen, beseeching Barlow's affections rather than earning them. For the better part of the play she is brow-beaten by Barlow, whose temperment quickly hits high dudgeon and remains there. It's in the text to say these things, but it's in the relationship – and the interest of the experience – to deliver them with some measure of reluctance, compassion and respect. Also, it needs to be taken with less yield and more resistence from Helen. .
Shimerman, on the other hand, is perfection. His Marius is self-assured in its affection for Helen. But, where as Barlow’s anger becomes the dominant mode of communication, his inclination to overprotection quickly appears patronizing. Barlow’s advantage is that she understands Helen’s true nature, and they have a special bond. Marius does not. His position is sanctified by religious authority, and their friendship's resemblance to romance.
Because it is the house, as a work of art, that validates Helen’s unique talent and lets us see her visions, the set is an important element of any production of this play. Given the metaphor, the light design is even more crucial. Budget limits what Giulio Cesare Perrone’s set can be expected to do. Nevertheless, it’s a let down. The big moment of transcendence, when lighted candles are meant to fire up tiny mirrors embedded throughout the walls and take us into Helen’s imagination, is missing. Ross Glanc’s lights start beautifully, but soon hit a single bright cue, and do not find a more palatable palette until Barlow’s "Love/Trust" section. Throughout the show, changes in light cues – and Bruno Louchouarn’s sound cues – draw too much attention to themselves.
There is a beautiful message of Zenlike subtlety in Fugard’s use of "Mecca" and "Road." Artists especially, but all people really, are both on the road to reach their destination – their promise – and they are at the same time, the destination they seek. More than once, Helen says, "I’ve reached my Mecca. . .. This is as far as I can go." It is as much revelation as it is resignation. The production, too, inspires both those reactions.
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