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One of George Bernard Shaw's missions as a playwright was to prick people's consciences. He has succeeded with director Jon Jory, who declares that Shaw's comedy drama "Heartbreak House" evokes in him a particular kind of guilt: "I should have paid more attention during the last election. I should have done more."
Jory's revival of "Heartbreak House" opens Wednesday at Intiman Theatre. The play, written between 1913 and 1917, is as close as Shaw ever came to writing a remorseless denunciation. He had been energetic and articulate in his opposition to the cascading follies that led to World War I. He couldn't believe that well-educated, serious people in Britain (and Germany, France, Austria and Russia) would succumb to perverse fears and hatreds, hysteria and war fever.
Eventually, Shaw was dismissed as unpatriotic, even "pro-German." His status as a public person plunged. When "Heartbreak House" was ready for production, the premiere took place in New York, not London.
The characters in "Heartbreak House" seem to be frivolous drawing room comedy types. Their conduct is frivolous all right. But when the background becomes clear -- war is about to break out -- comedy shades into satire.
"Shaw was exasperated by the way aristocrats, artists and intellectuals -- educated, cosmopolitan, sophisticated people -- were oblivious to the coming catastrophe," Jory said during an interview at Intiman earlier this week. "They were mainly concerned with their books, their art, their manor houses, their relationships.
"And I think a lot of us now look back at the 2004 election and think with some shame about spending most of our time thinking about the garden, the house, the job, the relationships."
Jory, 68, categorizes himself as an "old-fashioned liberal; yes, I know, we're called 'progressives' now." For 31 years, he was artistic director at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, best known for its annual festivals of new American plays. Now he is a teacher in the University of Washington's drama department and a freelance director.
"I feel easier now about expressing my opinions," he says. "We put on all sorts of plays at the Actors Theatre. Goodness, during any given festival we had something to offend nearly everyone. And if they weren't offended one year, well, they could come back and be offended the next. But as an individual, no, I wasn't in a position to go around saying what I thought about this or that issue.
"I suspect it's different for artistic directors in Seattle. But Louisville is a pretty conservative place, and I had board members at the theater who were quite conservative."
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was not at all conservative. He was a tireless advocate of socialism and vegetarianism. The grim mood that possessed him during WW I turned him, temperamentally, toward the work of Anton Chekhov (1860-1904). Chekhov professed great affection toward the Russian people. But his plays, though compassionate, are definitely not flattering.
While writing "Heartbreak House," Shaw found a template in Chekhov's final work, "The Cherry Orchard." Both plays focus on cultivated people in an eccentric country house. They prattle during a time of doom. The subtitle of Shaw's play is "A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes."
"But the people in 'The Cherry Orchard' are truly inconsequential," Jory says. "Shaw was incapable of writing completely trivial characters. They always end up being clever and witty or at least complex and engaging in some way."
Cleverness is ever the great asset and the great liability in Shaw. The early reviews of "Heartbreak House" mixed praise with dismay -- praise for ingenuity and dismay over prolixity: "We like the needle but we could dispense with the haystack," "A conversational debauch," "It is the play of a clown and a prophet, full of caustic insight -- but O Lord, how long?" and "Genius sails proudly upon wind tossed oceans of speech."
"What a director has to do," according to Jory, "is concentrate on the relationships. The characters have to talk to one another, listen, react. If they just revel in their clever speeches, the play isn't dramatic, it becomes an exhausting river of sound. You sit there in the theater and wish ... and wish that you were out mowing the lawn or something."
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