When you first see designer Loy Arcenas' set for "Misalliance" at Washington's Arena Stage, you might think you're in for an updated production. Arcenas' two-story tubular and glass structure looks more like 1950s modern architecture than an Edwardian English country home.
But purists not need fear. The use to which director Kyle Donnelly puts this set has more to do with reinforcing George Bernard Shaw's themes of parents vs. children and age vs. youth than with any forced updating.
Specifically, the set's balconies and railings are treated like a jungle gym by the play's younger generation -- not only by Lina Szczepanowska, the Polish acrobat who arrives at the house when the plane in which she is a passenger crashes through the roof, but also by Hypatia Tarleton, the proper middle-class young lady of the household, who craves adventure.
The set is an asset to a script that is excessively talky -- even by Shaw's standards, as he acknowledged by having Hypatia repeatedly rail against the "talk, talk, talk, talk" she puts up with from her underwear-magnate father, her propriety-stricken mother and her brutish proto-yuppie brother.
Ellen Karas is such a splendid Hypatia that she seems to have been born to portray Shavian heroines. Her vitality is so irrepressible, it practically demands balconies and railings for her to swing from. Nor is there any question that she is, as the script claims, her father's daughter.
Like his daughter, Richard Bauer's blustery John Tarleton is too full of vim and vigor to stand still -- except when his head is turned by Pamela Nyburg's energetic Lina, who temporarily sidelines him with her acrobatic exercise regimen.
The plot of "Misalliance" primarily concerns whom Hypatia shall marry -- her sniveling, aristocratic, intellectual fiance (JD Cullum) or the handsome hunk (Hank Stratton) who piloted the wayward plane.
But the details are of less interest than the play's ideas. Many of these -- on topics including the strained relations between parents and children, as well as the inherent value of ideas themselves -- are propounded by Shaw's spokesman, Tarleton, whom Bauer portrays in Shavian beard and mustache. (In contrast, as his wife, the upholder of old-fashioned values, red-wigged Halo Wines resembles Queen Victoria.)
My favorite Tarleton theory is: "Paradoxes are the only truths." "Misalliance" is full of paradoxes, especially when it comes to celebrating behavior that defies convention. It's also full of Shaw's attempts to sabotage criticism by including such comments as: "Democracy reads well; but it doesn't act well, like some people's plays."
Like Shaw's alter ego, John Tarleton, "Misalliance" is a play that can infuse vitality into verbosity. Arena's production, however, slacks off in the later scenes. This is due in part to T.J. Edwards' less-than-comic portrayal of the eleventh-hour character of a Socialist would-be assassin. But there's also a more general loss of steam in the late going. Up until then, this "Misalliance" largely succeeds in being what Hypatia insists she longs to be -- "an active verb."
"Misalliance"
Where: Arena Stage, 6th and Maine Ave., S.W., Washington
When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Sundays; 8 p.m. Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays; matinees at 2:30 p.m. selected Saturdays, 2 p.m. selected Sundays, and noon selected Tuesdays and Wednesdays; through Jan. 8
Tickets: $20-$39
Call: (202) 488-3300
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