Plays about improbable circumstances are always fun: What if Bill Gates, Hugo Chavez and Lady Gaga were stranded on a desert island? What could they possibly talk about? Washington Stage Guild is doing such a play, although its premise is not nearly so far-fetched.
If you go
“The Best of Friends”
Where: Undercroft Theatre, Mount Vernon Place United Methodist Church, 900 Massachusetts Ave. NW
When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday; 8 p.m. Friday-Saturday; 2:30 p.m. Saturday and Sunday; through May 29
Info: $40 to $50, discounts available; 202-582-0050; stageguild.org
“The Best of Friends,” by Hugh Whitemore, is about three historical characters who knew each other primarily through correspondence, rather than physical proximity. And although all three were intellectuals in one sense or another, they had very different ways of perceiving and relating to the world. The most familiar of Whitemore’s characters is playwright, critic, philosopher and reformer George Bernard Shaw (Bill Largess). In Whitemore’s vision, Shaw is more expansive, less irascible than he is often portrayed. This Shaw even does the tango. Largess appropriately fills in Whitmore’s gigantic outline of Shaw with delightful details, making entertainingly outrageous Shavian statements (“I was born literate”) sound perfectly credible, given their source.
The two other characters in the play are less familiar. Sydney Carlyle Cockerell (David Bryan Jackson) was an English museum curator and book collector and eventually became the head of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.
Dame Laurentia McLachlan (Catherine Flye) was a cloistered Benedictine nun at Stanbrook Abbey, who was responsible for the organization and restoration of Gregorian chant and an authority on medieval manuscripts.
Jackson is well-cast as the calm, rational, dapper Cockerell, a good counterbalance to Shaw’s flamboyance. But it is left to Flye to deliver the emotional punch of the play, which she does with poise and grace. The men of “The Best of Friends” live in their heads. Dame Laurentia lives in her heart and soul as well and Flye adds intelligent depth to the production.
Given his choice of characters and their passions, Whitemore is free to discuss religion, politics, art, class and more and there are frank discussions — and sometimes dissention — among the members of the trio on all subjects. Given their differing backgrounds and beliefs, it’s astonishing that the three were as compatible as they were.
But it is clear that Whitemore’s main interest is in friendship itself, a subject that transcends all others. Dame Laurentia remarks on the fact that her friendship with Cockerell is a “gift and a mystery” and Cockerell revels in her gifts of apples and primroses.
Since all Whitemore’s material is drawn from letters, public articles and speeches, the play could easily become dry and static. But as directed by Alan Wade, the production flows smoothly and quickly from one speaker to the next, who appear in different combinations on Jessika Watson’s handsome set, which provides a central chair and bookshelves for Cockerell and a church pew for Dame Laurentia. Shaw doesn’t need a place to perch: He breezes on- and off-stage giving the impression of a man who moves and thinks at warp speed at all times.
In addition to being a compelling window into the characters of three brilliant writers and thinkers, the Washington Stage Guild production is also a charming salute to an era — beginning in 1924 — when letters were a cherished means of communication and friendship was a value worth celebrating.
