About us > Past productions > 2007/08 > Heartbreak House
by george bernard shaw
directed by les waters
main season | roda theatre
august 31–october 14, 2007
Running time: 3 hours,
including one 15 minute intermission
the art
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).
