07/08 main season
by george bernard shaw
directed by les waters
the roda theatre
august 31–october 14, 2007
running time: 3 hours,
including one 15 minute intermission
the art
free speech
We like theatre that inspires talk. Please meet us for any of these free enrichment events.
docent presentations
Every Tue and Thu—
30-minute look inside each play beginning at 7PM
post-show discussions
Sep 20, Oct 2 and 5—
lively 30-minute post-show Q&A with the cast or other company members
night/OUT
Sep 6—post-show party for the LGBT community
book club
Sep 14—moderated discussion of Against All Enemies by Richard A Clarke beginning at 6:30PM
Artist, socialist, feminist, anti-war activist. Vegetarian, freethinker, street-corner orator and all-around raconteur…If there’s one playwright who belongs in Berkeley, it’s George Bernard Shaw. Maybe that’s why Shaw’s words have graced our stage more than any author except Shakespeare. In honor of the fiery classical tradition on which Berkeley Rep was founded, Les Waters stages Heartbreak House for our 40th birthday. In this comedic masterpiece, ridiculous aristocrats, eccentric suitors and iconoclastic women grapple with unlikely romance and ironic wordplay in a world on the brink of war. Shaw’s incisive wit and intellectual pyrotechnics light up the stage as his irascible characters challenge social conventions, sexual mores, moral hypocrisy and political folly. As with The Glass Menagerie, Waters’ sure touch on a classic text makes the script seem newly inked.
the artists
Best known as a playwright, George Bernard Shaw was also a prodigiously prolific novelist, critic, essayist, pamphleteer, politician and public speaker. The Nobel Prize-winning author penned more than 50 plays, at least a dozen of which are still regularly performed today.
Les Waters won an Obie Award for Big Love. The New York Times placed his production of Eurydice among the Top 10 Plays of 2006, and Time Out New York named his off-Broadway Apparition one of the Best 5 Plays of 2005. His recent hits at Berkeley Rep include Eurydice, The Glass Menagerie and The Pillowman.
The cast includes several faces familiar to Bay Area and Berkeley Rep theatergoers, including Michael Winters and Michelle Morain. This show marks the beginning of Michelle’s 25th year as a professional actress, and her first job was here, in the 1983 production of The Way of the World. Listen to Michelle Morain on her ongoing relationship with Berkeley Rep (3.6MB mp3).
the buzz
“George Bernard Shaw’s eccentric characters and bracingly funny, still cogently penetrating wit come through brilliantly in Les Waters’ crisp, comedy of manners staging of the World War I masterpiece, about smart, capable people living idle lives as Europe descends into carnage…The sharply performed characters, sumptuous design and often hilarious comedy provide a good deal of entertaining enlightenment.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“The charm and sheer genius of Shaw’s play is that it serves up a delicious intellectual smorgasbord of notions…Fascinating characters and wildly funny situations…And all of that is presented hilariously, and painlessly to an audience that, with only a little bit of introspection, can see itself in the very characters being poked at in this saga of love, marriage, sex, money and warfare…Director Les Waters has infused the play with a delightful spirit of fun and high style.”—Contra Costa Times
“[Director Les] Waters’ exquisitely bracing revival christens the Rep’s 40th anniversary season on a disquieting note, leaving the viewer simultaneously electrified and terrified…By turns brightly comic and intellectually rigorous, this Heartbreak House tickles the funny bone as keenly as the brain. The playwright’s condemnation of an apathetic generation smiling in the face of oblivion now seems more prophetic than ever.”—San Jose Mercury News
“This social satire is beautifully performed by a carefully well-chosen, extremely talented cast of ten who provide a perfect evening of classic theatre. Besides glamorous costumes of the period, there is a beautiful set, which received applause when the curtain rose.”—KGO radio
“A masterfully moving comedy about smart and sophisticated people hopelessly adrift in a nation at war.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“Shaw’s extravagantly comic but still human characters are men and women with eloquent tongues and ever-ready opinions who also have hearts capable of breaking and souls worth saving.”—New York Times
“Almost a century after it was written, Heartbreak House proves a keen comic rebuke to cynicism, self-indulgence and detachment, those all too easy responses to the bitterness of the world, which is still cruel after all, and surely as damnable as ever.”—New York Times
“Les has this remarkable ability to strip a play down to its barest essentials, to its most pure form. Les does not want to leave his mark on your play; he wants, instead, to reveal what the play is already.”—Sarah Ruhl, playwright (MacArthur Genius Grant winner, 2006)
the dates
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