The ship of state is rudderless and heading for the rocks in George Bernard Shaw’s masterpiece Heartbreak House. But who occupy the staterooms of Shaw’s fanciful, philosophical ship of fools? George S. Kaufman & Edna Ferber’s " Royal Family " or the creatures of Chekhov nibbling the crumpets of Bloomsbury? At the Huntington Theatre Company, director Darko Tresnjak treats the play, albeit skillfully, as a flamboyant drawing-room comedy, trusting the work’s elegiac edge to reveal itself glinting beneath the bohemian badinage of marriage bartering and broken hearts. Personally, I prefer a hint of Endgame in my Heartbreak House, but this brighter and more solid edifice will have to do.
Shaw began Heartbreak House in the midst of World War I, but the play was not unveiled until 1920. That it is an allegory is not open to question. " Heartbreak House, " the author fires as the opening salvo of a lengthy preface, " is not merely the name of the play. . . . It is cultured, leisured Europe before the war. " Inspired by The Cherry Orchard, the piece is subtitled " A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes. " But not being authored by Chekhov, its rueful comedy does not feature sighing around the samovar until the thwack of trees being felled intrudes. Rather, we get an Edwardian English house party that culminates with its ineffectual participants thrilling to a pyrotechnic display of German bombs. " Stand by, all hands, for judgment, " blasts the prophetic Captain Shotover. " I hope they’ll come again tomorrow night, " counters his free-spirited daughter Hesione Hushabye, unaware of anything but the beauty of possible annihilation.
Even by Shavian standards, this is a glorious play, and certainly relevant to the present time (Shaw’s reference, in the preface, to the previously unknown " evil of being slaughtered by a foreign foe on our own doorsteps " seems uncanny). It begins well at the Huntington, with the chiming of a clock that turns to a mournful tolling. But before the knell turns deadly, there are delusions aplenty to be popped like balloons in Captain Shotover’s skewed yet cushy ship-shaped house. This boat may not yet know it’s in danger, but it’s certainly loosed from the dock of stiff Edwardian society (represented by Hesione’s visiting sister, Lady Ariadne Utterwood). And that allows the mischievous, if railing, playwright much opportunity to knock stools out from under his characters’ assumptions and pretensions.
Young Ellie Dunn has just arrived for the weekend as Hesione’s guest, though the unflappably captivating lady of the house would seem to have forgotten her. Hesione’s project: to thwart Ellie’s plan to marry " bloated capitalist " Boss Mangan — ostensible friend of her cultured business flop of a father, Mazzini Dunn — for his money. In the course of the play, the idealistic but tough Ellie suffers a loss of innocence and allies herself with half-dotty, rum-fueled savant Captain Shotover. Presumably she will carry on his message: " Navigation. Learn it and live; or leave it and be damned. " Boss Mangan, on the other hand, is utterly beaten down and bewildered by the futile charmers who are his hosts. In the end, he sleeps with the dynamite Shotover has stashed " to blow up the human race if it goes too far. "
At the Huntington, the play is resplendently decked out on Alexander Dodge’s dark-wooded, leather-upholstered poop-deck drawing room that, during the second intermission, recedes to make way (to deserved applause) for the double-decked back of the house, with two bridges and what look like cannons beneath. Tresnjak’s staging is presentational, almost operatic, especially in this final act, where the characters take turns commanding the proceedings from the center of the upper bridge. Earlier, the goings on, though generally delicious, can get too broad, as in the handling of Boss Mangan’s blubbering.
The director has cut the entire sequence involving Shotover’s one-time boatswain returned as a burglar, and it’s hard to argue that, clocking in at just over three hours (including intermissions), the play’s not long enough without him. Like any Shavian gabfest, it can get talky, though in this generally well-acted production the conversation is lobbed with aplomb and, sometimes, daring affectation. It’s as if the inhabitants of Shaw’s " house without foundation " — Shotover, Hesione, and her flirtatious layabout of a husband, Hector — were all a little in love with their theatricality.
As Shotover, J.P. Linton is a big bear of a Donald Sutherland look-alike, hardly ancient but with a convincing shock of white hair, a striding limp, and a stentorian power that wins out in the end over his goofiness. Amy Van Nostrand is an Isadora-ish Hesione, arms undulating as she casts playful spells, but not without bite. Richard Bekins is ironic and self-aware as her handsome spouse with a " mustache like a bronze candlestick. " And Deirdre Lovejoy’s Ariadne mixes Marilyn Monroe with pure English steel. Mia Barron is a slightly strident if anchoring Ellie, and John Seidman is earnestly appealing as the first daddy to whom her breakable heart belongs.
