By Chuck Graham, TucsonStage.com
photo by Tim Fuller
Ellie Dunn (Bryn Booth), left, and Hesione Hushabye (Chelsea Bowdren) enjoy their superficial luxury lives as European threats of war are building.
“Heartbreak House,” a play by the remarkably prescient George Bernard Shaw, opens a new season for the always curious and intellectually searching Rogue Theatre. Directed by Christopher Johnson, this story is set in the upscale and hopelessly heedless household of the retired old salt Captain Shotover (Joseph McGrath) in Sussex, England, one ordinary summer day in 1914.
What we receive at The Rogue on a late summer evening in 2023, well over a century later, is the disarming realization that Shaw's satirical warning about the mounting tempo of World War I still stands today.
No matter how much we ignore our own ongoing clash of cultural and political events, something horrible is sure to occur in time. It's not going to go away.
This is the subtext that turns Shaw's theatrical shenanigans into poignance. Without resorting to slapstick silliness or wrenching violence, each of the players keeps adding more cynical shades of flavor to the crunchy word salad that is “Heartbreak House.”
On your way home after the play, you'll still be seeing parallels from Shaw that will fit these days. Johnson and his cast are creating characters who seem so insightful you will be wishing to see them in a more modern setting – such as having daily bouts of rousing social media discourse on the internet while looking steadily at their cellphones instead of looking at each other.
McGrath is first among equals in a cast of properly dressed friends and relatives gathered at Captain Shotover's ship-like residence. He stands for us, he is our Everyman, filled with false illusions, perhaps, but holding a steady course while being surrounded by a house of bright-eyed faux philosophers and fools.
Also keeping with our times is the strong female voice of women who set their own agendas. They are Lady Underwood (Carly Elizabeth Preston), Ellie Dunn (Bryn Booth) and Hesione Hushabye (Chelsea Bowden).
Adding a bit of humor is the household servant Nurse Guinness (Cynthia Meier).
Holding to the money-obsessed male point of view are Boss Mangan (Matt Walley), Hector Hushabye (Ryan Parker Knox), Mazzini Dunn (John Keeney), Randall Utterword (Hunter Hnat) and Steve McKee as the animated burglar Billy Dunn.
There's not a plot in the traditional sense but a continuing series of scenes in which self-obsessed people who consider themselves superior members of the wealthy and privileged class who can't help falling in love with each other, as they are similarly endowed.
Achieving more status is as important as acquiring more money than anyone else. Yet Shaw loves to point out, if people think you are rich that can be almost as good as being rich. Really, it's all about your attitude.
In the end, though, we are reminded how the rumbling bombs of war will decide the true winner.
"Heartbreak House" runs through Sept. 24 with performances Thursdays through Saturdays at 7:30 p.m., also Saturdays and Sundays at 2 p.m., in The Rogue Theatre of the Historic Y, 300 E. University Blvd. For details, 520-551-2053, or on line, www.theroguetheatre.org
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