Misalliance

Misalliance
by Bernard Shaw

Oh home! Parents! Family! Duty! How I loathe them! How I’d like to see them all blown to bits!

John Tarleton is a nouveau riche manufacturer of high-quality underwear, trying to enjoy a weekend in the country with his wife, son and daughter. His son Johnny is visited by Bentley Summerhays, an aristocratic suitor to his daughter Hypatia, followed by Lord Summerhays, his father, who also once proposed to her! But despite all of this excitement, she is bored. Strangled by convention, uninterested in the options given to women who marry (and women who don’t), she longs for something more – for adventure. To be, as she says, “an active verb.” She continues, “I want to be; I want to do; and I am game to suffer if it costs that. But stuck here doing nothing but being good and nice and ladylike I simply won’t.” She admits that she is even willing to marry the all-brains-and-no-body Bentley, just to make sure something will happen.

Thankfully, in drops some adventure straight out of the sky when a dashing aviator crashes the weekend (quite literally – his plane crashes into the house), and brings along with him a female daredevil. Shaw complicates the question of who will wind up with whom in this hilarious examination of marriage and the New Woman struggling to emerge from the constraints of Victorian parenthood and morality. With its multiple marriage proposals (a total of eight in one afternoon), it poses the famous Shavian speculation: “If marriages were made by putting all the men’s names into one sack and the women’s names into another, and having them taken out by a blind-folded child like lottery numbers, there would be just as high a percentage of happy marriages as we have now.”

Director Eda Holmes is updating the original setting to the swinging sixties – she explains why:

“The play was written at the height of the Edwardian Era (1910) which was epitomized by a rebellion against Victorian propriety in favor of more liberal views on everything including voting rights and social mobility. So what would parallel that in contemporary times? I went home and watched an episode of “Mad Men” and there it was on TV right in front of me – the early 60s! Filled with optimism, hypocrisy and fabulous clothes … Our goal [with this concept] is to reveal the clarity of Shaw’s brilliant examination of the microcosm of the family as a means of understanding the huge shifts that are happening around us right now. How the youth’s rejection of their parents is part of the evolution of society and there is very little we can do to stop it – and despite our fears we must be optimists and believe that this rejection is part of man’s natural drive toward a more civilized society.”

Director Eda Holmes’ production features Thom Marriott as John Tarleton, Catherine McGregor as Mrs Tarleton, Krista Colosimo as Hypatia, Wade Bogert-O’Brien as Joey (the aviator) and Peter Krantz as Lord Summerhays.