Imp of Paradox

By T.E. Kalem

MISALLIANCE by G.B, Shaw

Bernard Shaw is one of the few preachers whose sermons wake you up. The stage is his pulpit. It is also his concert hall, ballroom and battlefield.

He is a drawing-room soapboxer -- but what a magical box and what an enchanting drawing room! Here, he conducts words as if they were grace notes from Mozart or thunderclaps from Wagner. He leads the dance of ideas as if it were a minuet of the mind. He deploys conflicting personalities like a field marshal and has them lob paradoxes at each other as if they were hand grenades.

Shaw is up to all these tricks in Misalliance, one of his wildly irrepressible comedies. The drawing room belongs to John Tarleton (Philip Bosco), a self-made millionaire. Tarleton is an omnivorous reader and an avid fox hunter of ideas.

When he spots one, his shout is not "Yoicks," but "Read Kipling"--"Read Dickens"--"Read Ibsen"--"Read Mrs. Browning." Of course, being Shavians, Tarleton and the eight other whiz-tongued characters in the play have no time to read. Wittily, polemically, almost lyrically, they talk talk talk talk talk. This exuberant cascade engulfs such subjects as parents and children, the guerrilla war between the sexes, love and marriage, feminism, socialism and capitalism, the new technology (circa 1909) and how to tell a gentleman from a cad.

Naturally, the sounds of an upstaged plot line can scarcely be heard in this debater's Valhalla. Tarleton's daughter Hypatia (Jeanne Ruskin) is engaged to a simp named Bentley Summerhays (Keith McDermott), but she is restive and parched for adventure--which drops out of the sky when an airplane crashes into the greenhouse.

Enter the handsome aviator (Peter Coffield) and his passenger, the daredevil Polish acrobat Lina Szczepanowska (Patricia Elliott), Shaw's totally liberated New Woman. The third unexpected guest comes wielding a revolver. Gunner (Anthony Heald) proves to be Tarleton's illegitimate son, bent on revenge. This gives Shaw a chance to play the dialectical game of cat-and-mouse. Inevitably, Hypatia gets the aviator to chase her till she catches him. "Papa, buy the brute for me," she purrs to Tarleton. Papa does.

This Roundabout Theater revival is scintillating. Top honors must go to Stephen Porter, whose direction is lucid, polished and springy. His performers shine. Inside Tarleton's paunchy "ridiculous old shopkeeper," Bosco releases an intrepid explorer of the intellect. Elliott's "Polish lady" is a feminine blowtorch, and Heald's Gunner is infallibly on key, whether arrogant, cringing or crying drunk. As ever, the superstar is G.B.S., that Irish imp of genius.

--By T.E. Kalem

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