Riches unearthed in Shaw’s 1st play
Mortgage interest rates. Low-risk bonds. Property lines. A government commission report. You could be forgiven for thinking such terms are what you go to the theater to escape.
But so expert is Joy Carlin’s direction of George Bernard Shaw’s “Widowers’ Houses,” which opened Thursday, Feb. 1, at the Aurora Theatre, that a talky third-act scene digging into specific pound amounts and real estate square footage is always digging into something much more profound. Shaw exposes gentlemen’s income and property holdings to lay the men themselves bare.
Huffing and puffing behind their breeding and three-piece suits, they may spout liberal ideals, tout the nobility of their hard work and disdain the runaway avarice and cruelty of men whose wealth depends on others’ poverty. But no matter how seemingly modest one’s finances, who among us could say that every penny we’ve earned is pure? Or, as the play so memorably puts it, “People who live in glass houses have no right to throw stones. But, on my honor, I never knew my house was a glass one until you pointed it out.”
Eternally suspicious of money and self-righteousness alike, Shaw would go on to explore those themes more elegantly after “Houses,” his first produced play. This one, from 1892, creaks a bit. The plot relies on extraordinary coincidences. We don’t actually get to see young lovers Blanche (Megan Trout) and Trench (Dan Hoyle) fall for each other or embark on those famous Shavian duels of wit. And the play’s ending doesn’t satisfy. It isn’t just that Shaw neither fully punishes nor redeems his characters; it’s almost as if he abandons them with a shrug.
That’s where Carlin’s direction comes in. If you looked at the script alone, you could justifiably think Blanche and Trench don’t have much chemistry, even though their starcrossed courtship is the mainspring for Shaw’s conflict of ideas. (Blanche’s father Sartorius, played by Warren David Keith, acquired his wealth too immorally for Trench’s taste.) They spend more time calling the whole thing off over and over again than they do having a thing to begin with.
But Carlin makes the pair’s interactions zestily carnal. The chairs of Kent Dorsey’s library set might be overstuffed, the netting on Blanche’s dress as preposterous as wrought iron filigree (Callie Floor did the costumes), but Trout’s Blanche has the stance of a linebacker and the countenance of a whistling teapot. If Hoyle as Trench at first seems miscast — he’s more clown than leading man — the character, it becomes clear, isn’t a true leading man anyway. Hoyle can keep multiplying a double take so long you lose count; he discovers something new each time he looks up, down and back again. And as a shrinking namby-pamby with a mischievous spark in his eye, he’s the perfect foil to Trout’s human hurricane.
Carlin’s supporting cast excels as well. As Trench’s associate Cokane, a doddering bundle of politesse, Michael Gene Sullivan constantly finds tiny ways to evince the mammoth self-regard that hides behind his character’s studied humility; when another character reads Cokane’s writing aloud, Sullivan might helpfully point to a line Cokane is proudest of. As a German server and then a British maid, Bay Area comic treasure Sarah Mitchell creates superhuman mannerisms. The way her waiter’s eyes bore seemingly through the Aurora’s walls, you wish you could see a whole piece of fan fiction about the hired help.
Carlin gives us a taste of that at the show’s end, adding to the script a point of view that Shaw doesn’t fully develop. Postshow PowerPoint slides try to develop the notion further, with photos of contemporary homeless encampments and graphs of Bay Area rent. But the show made that point just fine on its own, that the tenements of Shaw’s London sound compassionate compared to how we treat our poor.