STILL RELEVANT, STILL RADICAL
Socialist at work: The great playwright, critic and activist — and yeah, one of the funniest people who ever lived — George Bernard Shaw is the author of HEARTBREAK HOUSE, the new production opening this week at Two River Theater.
By TOM CHESEK
“Even when we find ourselves indicted by his uncanny eye for our human failings and foibles, we cannot help but appreciate the mind and spirit of this writer who is not only still relevant, but still radical nearly 100 years later.” — Aaron Posner on George Bernard Shaw
Folks still drop the name George Bernard Shaw as if he’s going to saunter into the cocktail party. People quote him, claim to read him, wonder aloud what he’d make of our peculiar cast and crew here on the eve of a big Election Day.
They just don’t perform his plays as much as you might think. But then, the Nobel Prize-winning Irish playwright, critic, social activist and advocate for healthy living always struggled to get his works produced — even long after being elevated to the status of living legend.
Think about it — Shaw, who died in 1950 at the age of 94 (and only then after he fell off a ladder), lived on a timeline that straddled America’s Civil War and the Cold War; the Steam Age and the Atomic Age. The era of Oscar Wilde, and the Oscar that he won for the screen version of Pygmalion in 1938.
Then think about that body of work — Pygmalion of course, the inspiration for the more familiar My Fair Lady. Caesar and Cleopatra. Mrs. Warren’s Profession. Man and Superman. Major Barbara. Arms and the Man. Astonishing stuff, all of it; rivaling only the unshakable Shakespeare for knowledge of human nature and the marvelous music of our glorious bastard language.
In other words, nearly sixty years after beaming back up to whatever planet he hailed from, “GBS” is still scaring the beezis out of anybody who thinks they’re worthy of taking on those witty, wordy, idea-packed scripts.
Enter Aaron Posner, Artistic Director at Red Bank’s Two River Theater Company and a man who’s brought his dynamic outlook — think equal parts young Orson Welles and young Elvis — to hidebound classics from the quills of the Bard (last year’s bloody fantastic Macbeth) and, yes, Shaw.
Heartbreak House is the GBS play that begins previews tomorrow as the latest (and by far largest) offering of the new season at Two River. Written during the years of the First World War, the play is at first glance a dark comedy of manners in which a group of European idlers — guests at an isolated house that’s often been likened to a ship of state, drifting to the edge of the abyss — piss away the hours on matters like marrying for money, as the world beyond their walls slides inexorably into chaos and conflict.
There’s much more to it than that, of course. It’s a damning indictment of the so-called Powers That Be and their sole demonstrable skill — that of getting the rest of us mired in wars and other sticky wickets. You may find memories of the most current of events being jogged by various characters, situations and lines of dialogue. And if you don’t think it’s an accident that the play makes its debut on Election Day, then go to the head of the class.
Red Bank oRBit looked in on Posner as he rehearsed some of his eight cast members, including Dana Acheson, Christopher Donahue and Grace Gonglewski, against the surreal backdrop of Tony Cisek’s set — a wall-less island equipped with a humongous heap of old furniture and a screen on which bites of the play’s text were projected. With the screen hovering over a cadre of serious-looking assistant directors, stage managers and tech personnel — who were in turn hovering over glowing laptops throughout the auditorium — the effect was a lot like a tour of the old NORAD facility.
Here’s what went down in our interview.
RED BANK ORBIT: First question’s a little bit off-topic. Have you had a chance to see the spiffy new Count Basie?
AARON POSNER: No, I haven’t! I can’t wait to get over there. There’s an old story, in which a theater manager is being asked about his competition; he says “if you do good work, then I want you to open up right next door to me.” And everything in town is so much more vital, more exciting, with the two theaters. It benefits both of us.
So, HEARTBREAK HOUSE — probably not the most obvious choice when you do a show by Shaw.
It’s a very mysterious play; not an easy read, although the Roundabout did it not too long ago. But when you see it performed, then you get a sense of how funny and how clear it is.
Shaw is our most intellectual playwright. You need smart actors to do this material — you need a vital and engaged mind; the kind of mind that’s eager to grapple and explore. I can see that my actors are not so much physically as mentally exhausted at the end of our rehearsals.
Does it make similar demands on the audience? Do we really need to work at comprehending and following this play?
Shaw doesn’t want you to sit back — you sit forward. He challenges you to become actively engaged in the story; fortunately, we have a genuinely intelligent, insightful, engaged audience here. Now, you’re aware that this play runs four hours in its original form?
No! Yipe.
Well, ours runs two and a half hours, with two intermissions. The Roundabout came in at about three and a half. But I’ve cut, obviously, a lot of material for this production — I cut two entire parts. Not because I don’t have confidence that the audience can handle it, but because we live in a different world than the era in which this was first written and produced.
You know, Shaw actually wrote curtain raisers for his full length plays! People in those days wanted a full night at the theatre — they expected to be there and be entertained for an entire night. But as I said, we live in a different world, where there are concerns about the kids and the babysitter, many other things that would require someone’s attention.
Different or no, there are obvious parallels in the script to what I guess we’d call “today’s headlines” — and I’m sure that the scheduling of this show was very deliberate, falling right on top of the election.
Absolutely. Just as ReEntry’s premiere coincides with the inauguration in January. I’m sure you’ll find that a lot of our politicians are recognizable in some way in this play. There’s that line, “Every drunken skipper trusts to providence. But one of the ways of providence with drunken skippers is to run them on the rocks.” It doesn’t take a lot to figure out who that might remind you of.
Shaw, of course, was a well known Socialist, and here we’re still talking about Socialism in this country much as we might have a hundred years ago. Shaw was, at his core, a political playwright — everything had political ramifications. He was a passionate man — morally, socially, and passionate in love. The idea of heartbreak in this play is part and parcel of being a passionate person.
The old society in the years before the war spent a lot of time partying, to fill the gaps in their lives — they filled it with love, dancing, music. You could say that our culture has gaps to fill as well, but we tend to just watch things rather than being active participants.
Given the parallels, were you tempted with this production to re-set it in, say, Wisconsin or something?
I thought at first about losing the British accents, but the actors were lockstep against it. They said, how do we bite into this language if we don’t express it with the right accent? They were right!
Score one for the actors.
Oh, this is one of the best casts I’ve ever worked with. We have people here who have such an experience and understanding of Shaw; Ken Albers directs as well as acts in Shaw, and Grace Gonglewski is my “Shaw Diva” — she’s been in every Shaw play that I’ve directed.
We’re rattling the cage a bit; combining the world in which it was written with today’s world. There are design and conceptual elements that lift it out of its period. The costumes, which are very detailed, are a little bit further forward — not 1915, but still early 20th century. I’d say there’s sort of a silent movie energy to this production.
Speaking of which reminds me of the projection screen you’re using. How does that figure into the action; will there be silent-film intertitles that comment on the action, or vintage photographs?
The screen is going to be used in different ways, which you really didn’t get a sense of when you saw it earlier. I brought it in for one particular scene, because it provided a solution to a problem we were having. After that, I thought of other ways in which we could make it part of the production. If you know Shaw, you don’t exactly expect to see an enormous pile of furniture onstage, and a screen overhead. I’m a Brecht fan, you know; I like to be pulled in more than one direction.
Heartbreak House begins previews on Tuesday, November 4; opens Saturday, November 8; and runs through Sunday, November 23. Tickets are $34 - $60 and are available by calling the TRTC Box Office at 732.345.1400, online or by visiting the Box Office at 21 Bridge Avenue in Red Bank. Before Play, TRTC’s free, pre-show discussion series, is scheduled 45 minutes prior to every performance. Sharing real-life stories, Before Play will explore life before, during and after heartbreak.
Tomorrow in oRBit: With a career spanning more than half a century, this hipster jazz/bluesman makes a return to our area for the first time since — never?!
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November 03, 2008
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[...] HEARTS: Heartbreak House at Two River Theater. In an interview here on oRBit last week, Aaron Posner, Artistic Director at Red Bank’s Two River Theater Company, [...]
November 11th, 2008 at 2:04 am