Darko Tresnjak’s grand, crisp and well-tailored yet ultimately unsettling production of George Bernard Shaw’s irrepressible sociopolitical drama “Heartbreak House” is the type of show regional theaters were once famous for.
It has the old-world majesty of Hartford Stage back when Mark Lamos ran it. It has the European luster of the Long Wharf Theatre under Arvin Brown. It has the intellectual heft of Yale Rep when the position of “production dramaturg” was first becoming a big deal. (Yale Rep actually produced an intense “Heartbreak House” in 1986.)
It is as lively as such a tightly written, wordy show can be. It is warm and comfortable, despite its constant comic confrontations. It is well-spoken and impeccably dressed, thanks to costume designer Ilona Somogyi.
For its early scenes, this “Heartbreak House” stays true to its time and place: Sussex, England, in 1914. Then the ostensible villain of the piece, Boss Mangan, struts onstage and you know it’s 2017.
As portrayed by Andrew Long, the stuffy and stupid Mangan is made to resemble Donald Trump, replete with blond comb-over, squinty eyes and smoothly rounded belly covered by a three-piece suit. Long thankfully doesn’t attempt to do the role in a Trump voice. The visual is more than enough.
There’s plenty of precedent for having a powerful character in a play resemble a recognizable real-life ruler. The practice dates to Shakespeare, Moliere and beyond. This attempt, though, is
cartoonishly broad. Dramatically, it has the same effect as if you dressed Mangan up as a clown or in a dog costume. The audience has a big, prolonged laugh at the absurdity of it all. Then the plot and the tone of the show basically stop in their tracks. It’s a credit to Shaw’s script, and to some inspired casting in most of the other roles, that Shaw’s drama regains its footing and some powerful political ideas get expounded upon.
The other show Tresnjak directed at Hartford Stage this season, Shakespeare’s “The Comedy of Errors,” wasn’t exactly subtle either. But while that play lent itself to furious farce, “Heartbreak House” has more varied textures. Members of a dysfunctional family reunite, demonstrating how greatly they have grown apart in status, social attitudes and temperament. (All the tempers are short, but the volumes vary.) One of the daughters, haughty Lady Utterword (played
with beauty, grace and a wonderful slow-burn simmer by Tessa Auberjonois) has been abroad so long that at first she isn’t recognized by her father, the wacky octogenarian polemicist Captain Shotover (an agitated, wiry Miles Anderson) or her sister Hesione (the vivacious, captivating Charlotte Parry).
The token “normal” person who wanders onto the premises to witness all the madness is Ellie Dunn. This smart yet naive soul is played by Dani de Waal, as sweet yet strident as she was in the first national tour of the musical “Once,” which played The Bushnell in 2015. Ellie is devoted to her father, played by Keith Reddin, the actor and playwright who adapted “Rear Window” for Hartford Stage in 2015, and who finds the ideal comic/melodramatic balance for Shaw. Ellie is engaged to the boob Boss Mangan, but she is infatuated with a smooth-talking gentleman played by Stephen Barker Turner, who turns out to be the husband of her new friend Hesione.
There’s also a gratuitous spouse, Randall Utterwood (dapper Grant Goodman), and an iconic comic housekeeper (Mary Van Arsdel, fresh from the national tour of Darko Tresnjak’s hit “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder”).
In style, as well as in theater history, “Heartbreak House” falls in between Oscar Wilde’s “Importance of Being Earnest” and George S. Kaufman’s “You Can’t Take It With You.” The play’s greatest debt, as Shaw acknowledges, is to Anton Chekhov, who raised the family drama to a high realist art. There is high humor in “Heartbreak House,” but it emerges from the psychology of the characters. Unless you choose to dress one of them up as Trump.
The Trump intrusion can unsettle some scenes, but it can’t entirely dislodge a well-constructed play about emotional and societal uncertainty in changing times. Shaw satirizes big business, but also the military, family values, love, war and the British class system. There’s plenty to chew on here, including the extraordinary set design by Colin McGurk. In his script, Shaw specifies that Captain Shotover’s house must “resemble the after part of an old-fashioned high-pooped ship with a stern gallery,” and McGurk complies gloriously.
The ship-in-a-storm metaphor is apt for both the script and for this productions. Tresnjak seems to be testing “Heartbreak House” as a testament to our own troubled times. He steers this luxury liner of a script through roiling waters, willfully throwing obstacles in the way to make the trip more exciting. As the sage Shotover howls near the play’s frantic ending: “Navigation. Learn it and live. Or leave it and be damned.”
HEARTBREAK HOUSE is at Hartford Stage through June 11. Performances are Tuesday through Wednesday at 7:30 p.m., Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m., with added 2 p.m. matinees on May 24 and June 3 and 10. There is an added 7:30 p.m. Sunday performance on May 28. Tickets are $33 to $86, $18 for youth under 18. 860-527-5151, hartfordstage.org
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Andrew Long’s name.
