At the Publick, a witty poke at hypocrisy

July 13, 2007|Louise Kennedy, Globe Staff

"Talk, talk, talk!" exclaims the exasperated young Hypatia, who's the fiercest combatant on one side of the parent-child war in George Bernard Shaw's "Misalliance." And talk everyone does -- cleverly, amusingly, extensively, exhaustively -- throughout the Publick Theatre production's slender two hours. The play is a natural for the company, which continues this year to move beyond Shakespeare and explore the other possibilities of its slogan, "demonstrating the power of the spoken word."

Shaw knew that power, for sure; he also knew that the spoken word could knock you out, sometimes undermining his own efforts to illuminate audiences by punching out their lights with a relentless volley of speech. So one of the delights of this play is its many slyly self-deprecating references to its own garrulity, which become even funnier when, as with Hypatia, they arrive in the form of verbose complaints about everyone's verbosity.

But what, you wonder, do they talk about? The usual Shavian smorgasbord: capitalism, imperialism, feminism, socialism, even Shaw's pet topic, vegetarianism. (Can a vegetarian keep a pet? Or, for that matter, serve a smorgasbord? Oh, dear, the giddy garrulity is infectious.)

Anyway. It's all here, and more besides, notably a plane crash in the greenhouse, a fistfight or two, and an unstable young intruder in the Turkish bath. Oh, and a Polish acrobat.

But at the heart of it all is Shaw's mischievous fascination with social hypocrisy, and particularly with the way parents preach morality to their children in blithe disregard of their own less than moral practices. Hypatia's father, John Tarleton of Tarleton's Underwear, presents a respectable bourgeois facade and wants his daughter to do the same. But he's had countless affairs, and he's also told his daughter to think for herself and speak her mind. It's only a matter of time before the clash between respectability and reason explodes with a bang, around the same time that airplane lands with a crash.

Though the Publick has wisely pruned some of the more overgrown speeches, there are still moments when the characters seem less like people than like megaphones for Shaw's ideas. But when the ideas are expressed as entertainingly as this, it's hard to mind too much. And Diego Arciniegas directs his strong cast with focus and drive; the longer the speech, the faster he races us through it, so we never quite have time to grow restless.