George Bernard Shaw’s play “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” is 117 years old and not yet drained of topical resonance. Longevity is relative: Mrs. Warren’s profession — the profession — is popularly supposed to be the world’s oldest. It was ostensibly the play’s mere discussion (though never by name) of prostitution that got it banned in London for 30 years after Shaw wrote it. A more likely reason is Shaw’s condemnation of an economic and social class system in Victorian England that in his view might make prostitution seem one of the more sensible of the few avenues open to poor young women.
If you go
Mrs. Warren’s Profession is at the Shakespeare Theatre’s Harman Hall through July 11. Performance time is approximately 2.5 hours with one 15-minute intermission.
The scandal traveled: A 1905 New York production ran for only one performance before police raided the theater with arrest warrants for the entire cast. In Paris, “Mrs. Warren” remained taboo for 50 years after that. (So much for sophisticated French attitudes vis-a-vis sex.) The Shakespeare Theatre Company’s sturdy new revival of “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” is unlikely to draw much attention from law enforcement agencies, but it does deserve yours. Director Keith Baxter has zeroed in on the drama’s emotional nucleus — estrangement between mother and daughter — making what could have felt like an expired polemic into an evening of pastoral wit that builds gradually to an unexpectedly emotional climax.
Vivie (Amanda Quaid) is a modern woman of leisure, armed with a Cambridge degree and a skill set in advanced mathematics of no use whatsoever to a lady of her era. Her privileged but solitary upbringing has made her self-reliant and unpersuaded by her obsequious, white-suited suitor, Frank. Tony Roach is great fun in the role, but you can’t blame her for resisting him: His references to her as “Vivums,” and to himself as her “little boy,” are creepier and more evocative than any of the play’s oblique mentions of the skin trade.
A rare visit from her mother (Elizabeth Ashley, husky-voiced and regal as Kitty Warren, the titular missus) is about to afford Vivie the opportunity to ask some big questions: Why has Kitty never spoken of Vivie’s dad? And what exactly is the business that has paid for Vivie’s high education and comfy Surrey cottage, but that has also kept Kitty abroad for most of her daughter’s life?
Quaid does an admirable job of conveying the way her revulsion upon learning the answers collides with her instinctive need for connection with her mom. But this is obviously Ashley’s show. Her Mrs. Warren is maudlin and manipulative, but she’s unapologetic about her path to financial independence. Starting on her back, she’s climbed the ladder from labor to management. When she compares her fate to that of her factory worker half-sister who died of lead poisoning, or to barmaids and shop girls whose employers trade on their good looks without sharing the profits, as Kitty does — well, it almost starts to seem peculiar that as rational a lady as Vivie isn’t softened in her contempt at least a little.
Baxter supplies a lot of sunshine on his way to revealing the play’s dark core: He’s added four wry musical numbers set in the young Kitty’s brief time as a music hall beauty, decades before the action of the story. Designers, Simon Higlett and Robert Perdziola have supplied sets and costumes, respectively, that are opulent almost to the point of distraction. Even the supposedly penniless Frank looks like a million bucks.
Shaw never meant to legitimize prostitution; a committed socialist, he sought instead to condemn the forces that drove women to it. He and Ashley can share credit for the fact that Kitty Warren survives a century later as more than a mere op-ed prop. But it’s Quaid who is the revelation here. Shaw described Vivie as happy at play’s end, unconflicted about having broken with her mother on principle. But in offering a wearier, more resigned interpretation, Baxter and Quaid have done Shaw one better: They’ve made their Vivie a truly independent woman by allowing her to be a human being.
