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By
ROBERT W. BETHUNE
Morell, and Garrett Matheson as Marchbanks in Bernard Shaw's Candida, produced by the Lakeside Players at the North Lakeside Cultural Center, Chicago, Illinois. |
It seems as
though there’s an upsurge in Shaw around the country. Candida is
or has recently been produced in New York, Chicago, Baltimore, Minneapolis,
Ann Arbor and Princeton, Major Barbara in those same cities plus
DC, San Francisco, and Dallas, among others. Mrs. Warren’s Profession
has also been seen all over the place; it adds Greensboro, Stockbridge
and Denver to the list. Even Caesar and Cleopatra is showing up in Chicago, Los Angeles, DC and New York.
As
for me, I went to Chicago. I may be crazy, but for some strange reason,
Shaw and Chicago connect for me. Chicago isn’t erudite, but neither is
Shaw, despite his reputation. Chicago is intellectual, as any U of C or
Northwestern grad will tell you, and so is Shaw, as he himself will tell
you, over and over again, though some people may wonder about both. Chicago
certainly can be funny, as all those famous improv groups will tell you,
and so can Shaw; as with improv, it’s harder to be funny with Shaw than
it looks. But fundamentally it’s a matter of a certain kind of passion:
direct and powerful and disinclined to mess around, intolerant of fools
and even less tolerant of humbug, unlike some large eastern cities that
have five boroughs.
It’s
a place where people will actually come to hear Shaw done as a staged
reading, as ShawChicago has been demonstrating for years. People complain
about how verbal Shaw is, as though there were something wrong with using
language and using it well. Why not make that the strong point of what
you do? Sit the people down and let the language do the work. It works.
Remy
Bumppo is a Chicago theater company that prides itself on being “think
theatre.” It proved that it can think with its current production of Mrs.
Warren’s Profession. Here’s a play written in the 1890’s about a young
woman who discovers that everything she has in life, and everything she
is, was paid for by the proceeds from her mother’s chain of very successful
high-class whorehouses operating in carefully selected European cities.
Three men love her in various ways: the young man who wants her for herself
and her ability to make a living, which he sadly lacks; the dirty businessman
who wants her as a trophy wife, and the aging artist who wants her for
a daughter. Her mother loves her too; she wants her as a child-plaything,
someone whose life she can run. Vivie, the young woman in question, wants
none of these things and the story of the play is how she firmly rejects
them all. And the kicker of the play is almost unspoken, but absolutely
clear in this production: how much that costs her in personal pain and
in the cold life she chooses to lead. That’s where the thinking comes
in. Anybody can do this play and find the moral question. It takes thinking
to find the moral pain. Susan Shunk as Vivie does it without words, especially
in the final image of the play as we watch her working long into the night
alone.
If
Shaw can be done in a theater, what about Shaw in the drawing room? Rather
than put the drawing room in a theater, why not use a drawing room as
a theater? Take a mansion built just a few years after Shaw’s play originally
appeared. Fit about twenty people into one corner of the room. Let the
play take place practically in your lap. You will not find a more intimate
experience of Shaw than that, as the North Lakeside Players, a small Chicago
company, demonstrated with their production of Candida. Once again, the fundamental question for a woman is not, “Who do I belong
to?” but “Who will finally grasp that I belong to myself?” Shaw finds
a more pleasant answer for Candida than he does for Vivie, but it is an
answer that involves a compromise. Candida, unlike Vivie, accepts that
in the actual world where she lives, if she wants love, she will have
to deal with taking care of the man who loves her, and who can’t function
without her. What really makes the play worthwhile is watching how she
turns the men who compete for her into babbling jelly before letting them
off the hook. Amy Caldwell, as Candida, delivers that scene with just
the right mix of steely fury and steely control.
We
need theater like this that can make us think. We need playwrights like
Shaw who can wield language, not just use it, who are not afraid to put
a case before us, with all its angles and complexities revealed, not just
take a stand of some sort and flourish rhetoric around it, as so many
“political” playwrights do. The issues have not gone away; we may not
be very worried about brothels today, but dirty money in many forms is
very much around and bigger than it ever was. The need for voices that
can truly examine such issues, not just pontificate about them, is greater
than ever in this age of sound bites and hypocritical talking heads. Perhaps
that’s why Shaw is in Chicago, and in New York, and in LA, and in so many
other cities around the country where theater is done. Perhaps theater
companies are realizing that he offers just the kind of solid “think theater”
that is worth presenting.