Trisha Miller and Peter Van Norden (Photo by Craig Schwartz)
Reviewed by Deborah Klugman
A Noise Within
Through June 9
RECOMMENDED
There are two overriding reasons to see Misalliance, George Bernard Shaw’s witty, wordy, concept-driven comedy directed by Guillermo Cienfuegos at A Noise Within.
The first is scenic designer Angela Balogh Calin’s absolutely stunning set, the epitome of tasteful Edwardian opulence, with its cascade of vines draping the floor to ceiling window, the chandelier that wreaks of money to burn, and the detailed assortment of flowers, fruit and chachkas that deck this replica of a living room housing a moneyed bourgeois family circa 1909.
The second, more important reason is Peter Van Norden’s brilliant performance as men’s underwear magnate John Tarleton, an up-by-his-bootstraps, enormously wealthy man who has long ago tired of his wealth and now spends his days in philosophical and genuinely humanist pursuits, notably funding a public library system so that the play of ideas he cherishes can be accessible to all.
John’s family includes his warm, forthright-speaking wife, (Deborah Strang), who’d been a shopgirl in John’s employ before he wooed her; his daughter, Hypatia, bored and feeling suffocated with a life of privilege bare of adventurous horizons; and son Johnny (Riley Shanahan), an idle arrogant snob who shares none of his father’s aspirational values and thinks funding libraries is a profligate waste of family resources.
Having rejected many a suitor in the past, Hypatia has become engaged to Bentley (Josey Montana McCoy), the brainy pipsqueak-y scion of an aristocratic clan. At once smug and whiny, Bentley tends to get on people’s nerves, including those of his own father, the widowed Lord Summerhays (Frederick Stuart), who is paying the Tarletons a visit at Hypatia’s request. He and Hypatia share a secret, which is that he has proposed marriage, cherishing the hope that she will become his wife instead of his son’s.
The real action of the play jumpstarts around the spectacular landing of a small plane in the Tarleton garden. The plane is piloted by Bentley’s dashing friend, Joe Percival (Dan Lin) and his passenger Lina (Trisha Miller) a magnetically attractive and thoroughly liberated Polish woman with acrobatic talents and a take-no-prisoners tongue she brandishes when smitten men try to seduce her. The arrival of this pair stirs confusion among the heretofore established alliances within the family and their visitors. But the real bedlam transpires when an armed man (Joshua Bitton), hopping mad at Tarleton’s past seduction of his mother, stalks the house, aiming to shoot him.
Anyone who’s binged on TV’s Downton Abbey or similar shows (or perhaps read the novels of Edith Wharton) will know something of the social upheavals of the early 20th century — summed up as a decline in the finances and clout of the aristocracy, and a parallel rise in the fortunes of captains of industry, like Tarleton. In the Edwardian era, more and more marriages of mutual convenience began taking place between daughters of the latter and financially strapped heirs with an aristocratic pedigree. The title, Misalliance, refers to the (presumed) upcoming marriage between the indifferent Hypatia (her fiancé, because he has brains, seems like the best she can do), who is a merchant’s daughter, and the ineffectual stridulous Bentley himself — an alliance that, if it happens, would brook a class divide that for centuries was impossible to achieve.
As with the staging of any classic, Misalliance comes with its particular set of challenges —notably, rising above the period conventions, literary language, and, in Shaw’s case, a plethora of lengthy monologues that deal with a host of paradoxes about love, gender roles, the freedom of women, parents and children, economic injustice, and so on. In meeting these challenges, this ANW production is only partially successful. The story comes alive whenever Van Norden, exemplifying every inch a vital vibrant man of the world, with a questioning mind and a thoughtful heart, commandeers the stage. And there is a complementary dynamic in Strang’s motherly Mrs. Tarleton; in her own realm, nobody’s fool, she’s familiar as one of those slightly off center but nurturing ladies you wish the world had more of. She too brings energy — and truth — to the story. The third irresistibly watchable turn is owned by Bitton’s would-be assassin — he’s a cashier in a shop who labors for pennies and the only actively working class character among them,. The entire extended scene built around his effort to assassinate Tarleton, followed by his apprehension, are both the comical and intellectual highlight of the play.
But other performances need calibrating. Soto’s ingenue is sometimes lively, sometimes sulky. With Summerhays she is coyly flirtatious, one might even say manipulative. She declares her desire for other choices and broader horizons but the curiosity and vital esprit that would ever allow that to happen isn’t visible in this particular rendering, making the character neither as likable nor as interesting as she could be.
As the new man who catches Hypatia’s eye, Lin gives an animated performance. In other cases, the portrayals are too literary to be enlivening and in a couple of cases lean into caricature.
Still, all that said, the playwright’s famous wit registered with an appreciative audience the night I attended.
A Noise Within, 3352 Foothill Boulevard, Pasadena. Fri.-Sat., 8 pm, Sun., 2 pm, Thurs., 7:30 pm; thru June 9. www.anoisewithin.org. Running time: approximately two hours and 50 minutes with an intermission.
