And you thought your mom was a pain…

If there is anything theater can teach us with its poetic clarity, it’s that the world does not always operate quite the way we think it does.  Normalcy and decency are relative terms in pluralistic societies.  That which we deem “unsavory” is often the status quo.  It’s an embarrassment in any time or place to come to this realization about society, that we have less control over good and evil than we thought we did.  Or, what we thought good and evil meant, anyway.  I’ve seen “The Dark Knight.” I’m not alone on this.

This moral tale was brought to the table way before Batman cursed his handy bat wings, however.  Celebrated playwright George Bernard Shaw, whose oeuvre beautifully comments on social norms better than many, tells a tale of a mother, her daughter, their philosophies of business, and a family’s conditional love—yes, I said conditional love.  In “Mrs. Warren’s Profession,” we learn what profession might drive a daughter to resent her mother, a mother to shield her daughter, and a town of seedy men to mistake matrimony with lust and domination.  (How completely out of the ordinary, dirty old men!) It’s a profession that most call “prostitution”; I prefer “lady of the evening” or “sidewalk ma’am.” Whatever you call it, it’s nothing that comes up in parent-teacher conferences too often.  This mother-daughter relationship is one for the ages—“the oldest profession,” they say—and one that Shaw has skillfully made pertinent in any age and society.

In the end, it is not the specific act that people object to; indeed, it is the act responsible for our existence, so it’s not all that evil.  It is the way in which people maneuver their own free will in order to give someone else the pleasure of something that is not even real.  It’s about how easily we find ourselves stooping to new lows in order to feel so high, how inconsiderate we are of our own needs in order to satisfy someone else’s, however momentarily.

I don’t know about you, but even without “an office” (read: a corner), we all do this in our everyday lives.  We give up that which is important to us so that we can appear worthy to someone else.  We find the shortcuts to happiness and wealth (financial or otherwise) and circumvent the natural order of things to get there.  What Shaw does so well is illustrate human conditions like dignity and self-respect in the greater landscape of family, business, commerce and social morality.  They all intertwine so delicately and so deliberately to prove to an audience that we are all guilty of settling for things we don’t deserve.  And that patterns, by definition and design, will repeat themselves no matter how hard we try to stray from them.  (In another time, with another writer’s pen, this play might have been called “Settling Down In Funkytown.” But I digress....)

No matter how you perceive these characters, how inconsequential their predicaments are to your modern and legal life, you can’t help but to fall victim to the truth that all is not what it seems.  It’s when you undress the layers of decoration and distraction that you get to the underbelly of the beast.  That immorality is far more ordinary than anyone would like to believe.

See “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” at the unbelievable Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake through Nov. 1.  It is a thrilling night or afternoon at the theater, one that will provoke thought and conversation as much as it will make you laugh and sneer.  That’s theater for you!

Mrs. Warren’s Profession
Click on Video link on the above page and you will see a trailer for the production, with photos of the superb cast and hints at a set that earned its own applause every time it moved.  Some more information on the play and its characters can be read here.  Also, some history about previous productions of this show, where it was banned in Europe and how long it took for American audiences to finally give it a chance.

Photo courtesy Shaw Festival.

Posted by on 08/11 at 02:31 PM