October 5–12, 1995

critical mass

Major Barbara

Arden Theatre Co., 40 N.2nd St., 922-8900, through Oct. 29.

The Arden Theatre Co. opened its handsome new theater with a production of Shaw's clever old comedy, Major Barbara. The building is all white walls and blonde wood and big windows and airy staircase, and it houses (so far) a 175-seat house (intended eventually to become Arden's second stage when the larger theater in the enormous building is completed in 1997). They have, for this play, configured their comfortable, malleable theater so that both the seating and the stage are wide rather than deep — much like the production itself.

This famous play dismantles a cherished idea: "Right is right; and wrong is wrong; and if a man cannot distinguish them properly, he is either a fool or a rascal." Anyone in the audience who believes this, is, like the twit who speaks it, in for a good moral tweaking by this socialist-capitalist-Jesuitical-diabolical play.

Barbara (Grace Gonglewski), granddaughter of an earl, daughter of the indomitable dowager Lady Britomart (Hazel Bowers), has become a major in the Salvation Army. Despite her privileged background, she preaches in the streets and is intoxicated with saving the poor. Adolphus (Eric Hissom), a bemused and smitten professor of Greek, has pretended to join the Salvation Army because he is in love with Barbara. Her emptyheaded sister Sarah (Jennifer Childs) is engaged to emptyheaded Charles Lomax (Scott Greer); the family is completed by the useless brother, the aforementioned twit, Stephen (Marc O'Donnell).

Enter the long-absent paterfamilias, Andrew Undershaft (Douglas Wing), a millionaire merchant of death, a munitions manufacturer whose motto is "Unashamed" and whose radical beliefs challenge and ultimately redefine everyone's morality.

The dramatic struggle, as it always does in Shaw, takes the form of a debate: about class, government, religion, power, money, right and wrong — a dialectical battle staged among fierce and superb talkers. They argue in the drawing room, then in the Salvation Army mission, then in the nearly paradisiacal company town of the Undershaft industry, where, it would seem, all the social problems of poverty, hunger and violence have been solved. This is a play about Big Ideas, the biggest of which may be how we are to realistically deal with reality, and whether moral compromise is inherent in the word "realistically."

The theatrical struggle is to engage the audience in the debate and to entertain them all the while. Shaw manages this feat (in play after play), and the Arden production under Aaron Posner's direction largely succeeds as well, although it is tame rather than radical Shaw.

Gonglewski lends a sexual presence and a honeyed voice to the proceedings, although her Barbara seems less interesting than she might, and one might wish Wing's Undershaft were more substantial, more a presence, a force to be reckoned with; as it is, the debate is somewhat debilitated because he seems a generic Englishman, competently speaking his lines, rather than a powerfully odd and individualistic self-educated man. I felt the same weakness in the third important voice in the debate; Hissom as Adolphus Cusins gives us charm rather than eccentricity, the Euripides of a top-drawer graduate student rather than the passionate learning of a scholar wrenched out of his safe world, first by love and then by doctrine.

Bowers is not only a charmingly formidable Lady Brit, but two other characters as well: Rummy Mitchens, a bum to be saved at the impoverished mission, and Mrs. Baines, the head of the Salvation Army — giving us a different accent of a different class for each. Greer is hilarious in the usually throwaway role of public school moron Charles Lomax, and then, in Act II, transforms himself into Bill Walker, the brutal bum at the Salvation Army, who beats up women and nearly repents.

David P. Gordon's set design shifts from Salvation Army mission to drawing room and back again and then to the factory, all with clever simplicity, and Vickie Esposito's costumes are perfect — both in the opulence of the Britomart bosom and the dusty rags of the unsaved souls.

— Toby Zinman