Shotgun Players Production of "Mrs. Warren's Profession" by G.B. Shaw
1 rating since posting on Thursday, April 10, 2008
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So I went to this play on a Saturday night, sat way in the back at the Ashby Stage with my tea and an oatmeal cookie the size of my breast, and was blown out of the water. I thought I was in for a silly comedy of manners, in the style of Oscar Wilde perhaps. I was not prepared for relevant, pointed and brutally honest, timeless political & social commentary. But that is what I got. It’s a play about how interconnected our economies are and how every aspect of it is linked inexorably back to roots we’d rather not contemplate. (Think: environmental destruction, human rights violations, child & prison & slave labors, GM farming, animal mistreatment…) Once one starts drawing moral lines in the marketplace, in one’s personal lifestyle choices, one ends up in a tangle of dirty links; everything leads somewhere bad, it seems so hopeless, and in the end the only way to truly live a moral life on that level seems to be to cut oneself off completely from everything one knows. Off society’s grid, remarkably alone. It’s about choices, the ones we have and the ones we don’t. It’s about survival and self-truth, women’s rights and human ones. It reminded me that every tiny action is connected to everything. That personal choices do matter, especially in spiritual coin – that currency of sweet sleep and calm, that in the end those small, daily choices are the only ones we can truly make, the only way we can live our lives with the greatest possible integrity and joy. The costumes and sets were great, and the acting as well. The stand-out was the actress who played the mother. It won’t give too much away to mention her greatest gift in the role: the emotional shift in her linguistic patterns. A lower class girl who raised herself up into an affluent lifestyle, she carried herself well and spoke that light Victorian accent her new class demanded… but throughout the play whenever the character felt threatened, defensive, or emotionally raw, her accent slipped down into a cockney drawl, not instantly but gradually, inexorably, naturally. Not everyone in the audience would notice, perhaps, but I was blown away. She did it so well, it seemed so authentic, reflexive. Brilliant. I will leave you with this injunction: figure out what you believe in and stand by those beliefs even when they are not popular, even when they are inconvenient, even when they seem meaningless. Because they are not, and never can be, meaningless. Because every tiny thing you do for good leaves the world a better place, even if you never see those results. I left the theater with renewed hope and determination to live a good, honest, ethical life, and I wish the same for all of you. - Si , posted 04/10/08 |
