Foxy lady

Trinity puts its brand on Mrs. Warren

by Carolyn Clay

MRS. WARREN'S PROFESSION. By George Bernard Shaw. Directed by Brian McEleney. Set design by Michael McGarty. Costumes by William Lane. Lighting by Russell Champa. With Stephen Berenson, Robert J. Colonna, Timothy Crowe, Mauro Hantman, Jenn Schulte, and Anne Scurria. At Trinity Repertory Company, through November 7.

The title character of George Bernard Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession runs a chain of European bordellos. And the play itself is turning into something of a franchise operation this fall, with Trinity Repertory Company's staging coming right on the round heels of Boston's Huntington Theatre Company. Seeing the two productions back to back brings home the truth in the oft-mouthed cliché of theater as a living, mutable thing. Taken together, two such dissimilar treatments of the same 105-year-old play are a primer in stagecraft as a changeable, collaborative art. The Huntington rendition of the play is handsomely staged and polished in its wit, though not without passion. Trinity's is broader, earthier, stripped-down -- and awash in the "blood on the floor" that Huntington director Michael Bloom, though his production is more decorous, attributes to the play.

Some might argue that the Huntington's more elegant staging substitutes mothballs for, well, balls. By contrast, Trinity's does not lack cojones -- though they're mostly displayed by the women. And actresses Anne Scurria and Jenn Schulte, as brassy Kitty Warren and her no-nonsense daughter Vivie, have got thespian testosterone to burn. Their impassioned, embattled encounters are the heart of Brian McEleney's oft-strident production, which tends to make fops and fools of the men, Timothy Crowe's slithery/ seductive Sir George Crofts excepted.

The production also mixes elements of Victorian stagecraft, including a gilded proscenium and plush curtain (things never seen at Trinity Rep), with a bare-bones, highly physical assault on the play, which sees characters strong-arming (not to mention trodding upon) the rudimentary furniture and translating mental and emotional menace into bodily threat. I admit that I found some of the broad stylization brutishly annoying. Must Vivie Warren sit and stride like a lumberjack? Is it not beyond the pale for young Frank Gardner practically to have sex with his girlfriend's mother, old floozie though she may be? Is the energetic Trinity tradition being almost bowdlerized here?

Certainly the jarring contemporaneity interferes with the wonderful interplay between period sophistication and intellectual fire that characterizes Shaw at its best. Then again, Mrs. Warren's Profession, though startlingly modern and substantive, is not Shaw at his absolute best. The play, one of GBS's earliest, encases its anti-capitalist message in a mother-daughter melodrama that Trinity's explosive staging pushes to the fore.

In its day, of course, the play created something of a melodrama of its own. Banned by the Lord Chamberlain, the 1894 work was not publicly performed in England until 1925, and the producer and cast of the first American production (in 1905) were arrested. This was less because Mrs. Warren's profession is the world's oldest than because fervent socialist Shaw, looking to its cause, pointed the finger not at "female depravity and male licentiousness" but at a hypocritical capitalist society that offered women no options but legitimate or illegitimate whoring and penury.

Mrs. Warren's Profession, one of three works Shaw categorized as Plays Unpleasant, centers on the confrontation between the title character, an unrepentant prostitute turned brothel-chain "managing director," and her priggish, privileged daughter, an educated "modern woman" as unbending as her mother. At first the sheltered Vivie, having been introduced for the first time to the source of the family income, is swayed by her mother's argument regarding a poor woman's choice between the scullery and the streets. But when she realizes that Kitty has graduated from the ranks of the exploited to those of the exploiters (exemplified by her business partner, Sir George), budding actuary Viv resolves to reject not only Mrs. Warren but everything else that might muddy her chosen, self-sufficient path. That includes art, as extolled by family friend Praed, and romance, as proffered by charming-wastrel suitor Frank.

At Trinity, where McEleney puts forward a boisterous, anti-presentational staging on an exposed set by Michael McGarty, Scurria is a garishly dressed, too vulgar, but compelling Kitty Warren with the snarl and strength of a tiger. She also conveys the buckling pain and desperation of a woman losing the only thing, apart from doing business, that she loves. And Schulte's Viv, less prim than doggedly forceful, is every inch her mother's daughter. Crowe, in the evening's most subtle performance, is a brooding, unflappable Crofts, less frightening in his calculated explosions than in his silky self-justification. And Robert J. Colonna brings a ruffled dignity to the pretentious cleric with a past, Reverend Sam Gardner. To my mind, Stephen Berenson's yellow-permed Praed is too swishy and fussy, and Mauro Hantman way overdoes Frank's clowning. Certainly McEleney's approach to Mrs. Warren is closer to circus barker than to Granville Barker. Still, the tough handling befits Shaw's tough conclusion, in which a happy ending can't be had for mother love or money.