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Director John Rando -- who brought the play to S.F. after a successful run at the Old Globe in San Diego -- has staged the deviant proceedings with only the thinnest film of irony. William Anton as the pup-struck Greg embraces the role with untempered conviction, tossing off the oddest of lines with Leave It to Beaver earnestness. Dan Hiatt, in multiple roles as Tom, Kate's friend Phyllis, and sexually ambiguous therapist Leslie, deftly toys with his audience in a dance of subtle and unseemly nuances. Only British-born Jane Carr strikes a hollow note -- struggling vocally with her New York accent and interpreting the role of the schoolteacher wife with the subtlety of a Monty Python drag skit.
The end of this peculiar play triggers the most confounding realization: Perhaps unknowingly, Gurney has written a remarkably liberating female role. Waymire's inventive, electric Sylvia stubbornly retains her doglike essence in the face of Greg's relentless and unsettling projections. She follows her instincts of loyalty, lust, anger, clarity of purpose, and rambunctiousness. Bereft of the female burdens of self-consciousness, she offers a glimpse into a life free from gender's absurd constraints.
-- Carol Lloyd
Shaw's Wicked Smile
Mrs. Warren's Profession. By George Bernard Shaw. Directed by Richard Seyd. Starring Maura Vincent, Concetta Tomei, and Charles Lanyer. At the Geary Theater, 415 Geary (at Mason), through July 13. Call 749-2228.
Toward the end of the ACT's production of Mrs. Warren's Profession the scene has to change quickly from a sunlit country garden to a sober London office in Chancery Lane. Miss Vivie Warren has just met her mother for the first time and is shocked to learn a number of things: that Mrs. Warren is a madam, that her own education at Cambridge was paid for by a European network of brothels, and that the man she was ready to fall for, Frank Gardner, is probably her half-brother. She's disgusted and decides to live for herself in London, giving up on romance and rejecting her mother. It's a happy ending, in George Bernard Shaw's world. But the shift from the country to Chancery Lane uses a storm (blowing bikes and parasols like the tornado in The Wizard of Oz) and a howling locomotive to distract from the green turf and trellised cottage twirling offstage. The switch is exciting but disruptive. On opening night, the audience was rapt right up to this expensive and goofy special effect, but after that everything dragged.
It's hard to say whose fault this is. It could be Shaw's, since he tells his story using almost three solid hours of witty conversation and very little drama; maybe by the end all the talk just wears. It could be Concetta Tomei's, who seems to lose her focus on Mrs. Warren in the final act and lapses into a grating, repetitive voice. But Tomei has excellent control otherwise, and for the first three acts (there're four total) the unraveling story of her past is involving and well-performed. Maura Vincent plays Vivie with a light, understated touch that makes her the most human character in the play, and a nighttime scene in the country garden that shows her learning about lower-class life in her mother's day -- when absurd wages and lethal factory conditions regularly drove women to streetwalking -- is very powerful. It's a dark interlude between two blithe daytime scenes of courtship and witty banter. Vivie spends those scenes resisting the young Frank Gardner, who woos her with love, and the old George Crofts, who tries to lure her with money; and the story moves nicely up to a gunpoint face-off between the two men. Raye Birk plays Crofts as a compellingly wily capitalist snake, and Matthew Boston, after he warms up, is an entertaining Gardner, a smarmy little British no-'count. While they make fools of themselves over Vivie you can almost see Shaw's wicked smile behind the stage -- the satire, the timing, is beautifully done.
But then the scenery shifts. The locomotive noise and jets of steam feel almost like a joke, as if director Richard Seyd thought he could make an elaborate logistical problem fun by masking it in mock-Victorian trappings worthy of My Fair Lady. The result is good for the set -- the oak-paneled office looks more engaging than the sterile country yard -- but not so good for the play. For whatever reason, and I think the set change helps shatter the spell, the act showing Vivie's determination to lead her own life in London has less vitality than the others, and feels like a forced coda to an otherwise spirited show.
-- Michael Scott Moore
Drama Class
Eisenhower Hour. Written and directed by Rich Baker. Starring Libby O'Connell, Robert G. Kennedy, Greg Lucey, Lisa Monahan, and Erin-Kate Whitcomb. At the Cable Car Theater, 430 Mason (at Post), through Aug. 3. Call 956-8497.
The dorky crossing guard, wearing cuffed high-waters and directing traffic on Mason Street with a little red stop sign, offers the first clue that this new comedy is interactive. "You be careful!" he shouts at a couple dashing across the street against the light; looking back in confusion, they are nearly mowed down by oncoming cars. Onlookers exchange amused glances. It's more of the same inside the theater, where a 1950s high school assembly is about to take place. A Miss Porter, taking tickets at the theater's entrance, greets an inquiry about the bathroom by filling out a bathroom pass. "Homeroom teacher?" she barks. Startled silence. She lowers her horn-rimmed glasses. "Are you new here?" she asks. Vigorous nodding. "OK, then," she replies primly, tearing the pass from her notepad, "never mind." Before the assembly begins, a hood with a greasy DA materializes from behind a seat. He introduces himself as Bud and proffers a fifth of Jack Daniel's. "Drink?" he asks with a conspiratorial grin.
