07/08 main season
heartbreak house: shaw’s response to the great war
shaw’s surreal and unconventional heartbreakers
heartbreak house resource list
an anodyne to complacency
Ever since the hallowed and over-hyped sixties, (during which I myself played a hallowed and over-hyped role), I have found myself in any number of conversations about why the general population has become so complacent. Wars, economic downturns, the prevalence of violence, massive problems in health care and education…none of it seems to jar enough of us into any real form of sustained protest. Theories abound: we are too comfortable, too scared, too self-absorbed. We are too busy, too tired. We are more in love with the desire to hold onto the routine of our daily lives than to embrace the discomfort and risk of social change. We are terrified of being attacked, and have limited our focus to what we feel we can control. We prefer complaining and railing against our government while enjoying the delights of a great meal, a great movie, a great massage. We are too addicted to computers, too addicted to television, too addicted to food. We have been cajoled, persuaded and sold on the idea that it’s better to simply enjoy what we have until we can no longer enjoy it.
But because the traumas of the world are only a click away from our consciousness, because the next attack is a matter of when and not if, because our larger, collective worries lie just below the habits and distractions of our daily lives, we often feel a sense of unease or a disconnect between how we are living and what lies just outside our door. Relaxing, in this climate, is hard work, and we have to be very creative in our conversation and behavior in order to ward off a constant feeling of anxiety that the world is spinning out of control.
When Les Waters approached me about directing Heartbreak House, it seemed wildly appropriate. No other play that I know of speaks so directly to the situation at hand: a humorous depiction of a desperate class of people desperately working to prove that they are not desperate. We have produced this play more than any other play in the history of Berkeley Rep, simply because it speaks to our culture and our situation in a way few other plays do. It has all of Shaw’s distinctive trademarks: a relentless, scathing wit; a potpourri of fantastically entertaining characters; and a huge yearning on the part of the author to jar us out of our political complacency. It is a terrific way to start this, our 40th season: a great classic that continues to sustain us by putting the proverbial mirror up to nature with imagination, intelligence and charm.
Welcome to the new year at Berkeley Rep.
Tony Taccone
Artistic Director
happy birthday—to all of us
Forty years! It’s quite a milestone for a scrappy company that started in a storefront on College Avenue. In 1968, a handful of talented artists came together with the dream of producing adventurous work for an equally adventurous audience…and here we are! As we’ve planned this yearlong birthday party we’ve looked back on our history, drawing on our strengths as we unveil plans for the future. Berkeley Rep has always been an ambitious company, and I’m proud that we continue to look ahead.
It’s not just a pun to say that the world has changed dramatically in the past 40 years—and we’ve changed with it. Plays that were new and wonderfully unsettling to an intellectually and politically engaged audience in 1968 now often feel like period pieces. We’ve responded with an aggressive program to commission new scripts, supporting a generation of writers that speaks to who we are and what our world is about in the 21st century.
In the early seventies, the faces in our audience were mostly 25 to 50 years old. These folks have grown up with us, and many have joined the ranks of the retired—or hoping to retire! Today, many people in our audience work long hours and juggle extensive family obligations, and they have more entertainment choices than ever before. So we’ve introduced more flexible ticket packages, a variety of curtain times and other benefits that make it easier for those who purchase seats in advance.
Personally, I’m most excited about our latest transformation. To celebrate our birthday, we’ve substantially reduced prices for every performance in each of our theatres. We want to stay true to our roots and make sure that we’re accessible to anyone who loves and wants excellent, adventurous theatre. So share the gift! Bring your parents, your children, your neighbors, your teachers. Berkeley Rep is once again, the best value in town!
See all seven plays that Tony has thoughtfully selected for our 07/08 season. Take full advantage of our Free Speech programs, like pre-show talks with our docents, post-show discussions with our artists, our new book club and the Liner Notes that our dramaturg sends out by e-mail before each show. Enjoy the sweets and savories at our snack bar that, in true Berkeley tradition, now focus on local and seasonal delicacies. Or sample something from the rich menu of continuing education programs offered next door in our School of Theatre.
There are classes for adults—whether you’re a theatre enthusiast or a professional performer—and numerous activities for children and teens. That’s because, sadly, one of the other changes we’ve seen in the last 40 years is a decrease in funding for arts education in our schools. So, once again, Berkeley Rep has responded—with the most extensive school residency program of any institutional theatre in California.
So please, if you’re not already a member of our family, join the party. This year, we’re all singing happy birthday to you!
Susie Medak
Managing Director
heartbreak house: shaw’s response to the great war
by Madeleine Oldham
“It is impossible to judge what proportion of us, in khaki or out of it, grasped the war and its political antecedents as a whole in the light of any philosophy of history or knowledge of what war is…But there can be no doubt that it was prodigiously outnumbered by the comparatively ignorant and childish.”—George Bernard Shaw
Following the outbreak of World War I in 1914, George Bernard Shaw spoke often and extensively about the need for his fellow citizens to open their eyes to the world’s political situation. A man of unending appetite for ideological discourse, he produced a constant river of speeches, letters, essays, pamphlets, newspaper columns and magazine articles concerning the causes and evils of the war, and what should be done about it.
As a committed member of the Fabian Society (a segment of Socialism that advocated a slow and steady approach to change rather than revolution or overthrow), it made sense that the seemingly passive act of writing served as Shaw’s primary vessel for affecting the change for which he so passionately advocated. Shaw’s tactics centered on the premise that if a person’s thinking changed, then so would his or her actions. His goal was to get people to think. He did appear to understand that there exists a natural human difficulty in comprehending the scope and magnitude of such large-scale events, and he worked diligently to achieve a level of understanding for himself. In order to write with authority about the situation and to pen his seminal and controversial pamphlet Common Sense about the War, Shaw notes, “I had to slave for months getting the evidence…It makes me sick to recollect the drudgery of it all.”
He insisted that others had a duty to do the same, and what he saw instead distressed and enraged him. He railed against the blind nationalism that emerged in England after the war began, as well as the uninformed and oversimplified sentiment among the public that England was right and her enemies were wrong. In a letter to philosopher and writer Bertrand Russell, Shaw wrote, “It is our job to make people serious about the war. It is the monstrous triviality of the damned thing, and the vulgar frivolity of what we imagine to be patriotism, that gets at my temper.”
Shaw seemed to consider the leisured class the primary culprit. He saw their lack of concern for the war raging around them as potentially more dangerous than the war itself. He declared that the only people who had the ear of politicians powerful enough to change the course of the war were precisely the people who persisted in maintaining a blissful ignorance about anything to do with it. Groups such as “the Souls” (an aristocratic bunch devoted to a cultured life, and who would never allow a silly war to come between them and their dinner) and Bloomsbury (the set of London intellectuals which included Shaw’s friends Virginia and Leonard Woolf) represented to Shaw the collective and abominable evil of complacency. Heartbreak House was born in reaction to this.
Along with a number of other literary responses to the war, Heartbreak House is often considered to be one of the early 20th century’s great works of apocalyptic literature (that is, literature which envisions the coming of the end of the world or a particular catastrophic event; post-apocalyptic literature presents a view of life after a global disaster has already occurred). Other examples include T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, William Butler Yeats’ The Second Coming and Karl Kraus’ The Last Days of Mankind. These works all have in common a depiction of a world that can’t continue on its current course.
But, much like the way individuals can have a hard time comprehending a war, how to translate such a huge idea to the page effectively poses a daunting challenge. Historian Jay Winter calls war “a conflict of dimensions so vast as to defy realistic description.” Winter offers that the apocalyptic imagination is one way to “bypass realistic representation” and convey the scope and scale of war in a written work. By exaggerating the responses of his characters to their impending doom, Shaw is able to drive his point home in an unsettling and powerful way. New York Times theatre critic Charles Isherwood describes it as “well-groomed humanity greeting its own destruction with an inviting smile,” continuing to posit that “Shaw surely meant it to shock his countrymen into an awareness of the possibly dire consequences of a continued political and moral paralysis.”
Though evidence suggests that it was completed in 1917, Shaw waited until 1919 to publish and 1920 to produce Heartbreak House. (He published no plays while the war was still going on.) The eagerly awaited print edition was poorly received in England, and roundly criticized for being verbose and incoherent. As a result, Shaw chose to premiere the play in New York, where it ran to favorable reviews and public acclaim.
shaw’s surreal and unconventional heartbreakers
by Madeleine Oldham
Often called Shaw’s version of Chekhov, Heartbreak House owes a debt to The Cherry Orchard in particular, which has its own harrowing view of upper-middle-class ennui. Shaw saw a production of Chekhov’s masterpiece in 1911 and came away outraged that such a brilliant play and piece of social commentary had met with a lukewarm response in England. Shaw found inspiration in The Cherry Orchard, and even subtitled his play “a fantasia in the Russian manner on English themes.” The two plays share a scathing indictment of the complacent leisured classes. Shaw declared them both full of “the same nice people, the same utter futility,” though he was quick to distinguish that his play directly referred to prewar Europe rather than turn-of-the-century Russia.
When Heartbreak House was only the beginning of an idea, Shaw’s original title was “The Studio in the Clouds,” revealing his early thinking about the play as one that dwells in a removed and ungrounded place, and literally has its head in the clouds. At first glance, the play seems a piece of realism about an eccentric upper-class family and their houseguests. Upon closer examination the realistic picture dissolves, opening up a portal to a peculiar and almost surreal landscape.
The characters drift along a strange flow of narrative that sometimes seems to float directionless, ambling from one thought to the next by association. Shaw dispenses with action prescribed by cause and effect, and allows his characters, and therefore the piece as a whole, to find their own logic. This lends the play its surrealistic quality, creating a dreamlike atmosphere where house and ship merge, social graces are turned on their heads and sleeping and waking have no regular schedule.
The language of metaphor plays a huge part in the play. Perhaps the most obvious metaphor Shaw employs is that of sleeping as a symbol for ignorance. There is much discussion of where characters will sleep (logistical details that in most houses would have been worked out well ahead of guests’ arrivals). As soon as we meet Hesione she reveals that she has just fallen asleep in the middle of trying to make up Ellie’s room, perhaps implying her inherent inability and unwillingness to execute even the slightest task that could be construed as work. (Shaw often expressed his disgust at the leisured classes’ lack of interest in anything they didn’t find enjoyable.) Other characters drift in and out of sleep, including Boss Mangan, who is hypnotized by Ellie, and Captain Shotover, who talks frequently of being too old to achieve the blissful ignorance of sleep, try as he might.
When “a sort of splendid drumming in the sky” is heard, Shaw is referring to the bomb-dropping zeppelins moving through the sky in the distance. He evokes the zeppelin as a symbol of society’s imminent destruction. (Here can be drawn another parallel with Chekhov: both use sound for mysterious and ominous effect. Alongside Shaw’s splendid drumming lies the distant sound of a string breaking in The Cherry Orchard that is thought to represent a break in time or the end of an era; both are sounds that resonate beyond, and transcend, their everyday origins.)
This apocalyptical vision positions itself alternately at odds or in sync with the shifting form of the play: it is sometimes a giddy farce, sometimes a comedy of manners and other times an elegiac lament. In keeping with Shaw’s Fabian leanings, his version of apocalypse was somewhat gentler than some of his counterparts like Eliot or Yeats, offering a picture not of the destruction of civilization as a whole, but rather of those he deemed too ignorant to survive. Shaw manifests this opinion in his characters; even their names point toward their demise. One study guide to Heartbreak House notes that “‘Dunn’ (done), ‘Utter’ (the ancient form meaning death), ‘Shot’ (as in tired), ‘over’ and ‘bye,’ all…suggest endings.”
What Shaw means by “heartbreak” differs from the common understanding of the word. He does not refer merely to a romance gone wrong, but rather to the breaking of a heart in a larger sense—a broken heart is one that is devoid of passion for life. Heartbreak denotes an irretrievably damaged spirit, one for which the only remedy is to be destroyed.
world war I
Also known as “The War to End All Wars” and “The Great War.”
Over 8.5 million people died, with over 21 million more wounded and 7.5 million captured or missing.
dates
- July 28, 1914: The first declaration of war—Austria on Serbia.
- Followed in early August by German declarations of war on Russia and France.
- Britain entered the war on August 4, declaring war on Germany.
- November 11, 1918: Armistice signed and war officially ended.
zeppelins
- The first zeppelin attack on Britain took place on January 19, 1915; zeppelins bombed London in May of that year.
- Zeppelins had previously served as passenger airliners before being adopted by the German military.
- In a famous letter to his friends Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Shaw expressed his momentary enchantment with watching a zeppelin glide through the sky, despite his thoughts of the people inside as it burned up and fell to the ground.
the somme offensive
- An attack on German forces by England and France which lasted from July 1–November 18, 1916.
- 58,000 British troops suffered casualties on the first day of the attack (over 19,000 died: a still-standing record for the number of troops lost in one day).
- Total casualties estimated at 1,120,000 (620,000 British and French; 500,000 German).
- Centered near the French cities of Amiens and Albert, which lay approximately 200 miles from the house in Sussex where Shaw wrote a portion of Heartbreak House. Shaw claimed to have heard the guns from the garden.
spotlight on michelle morain
michelle morain talks with berkeley rep
dramaturgy / literary intern lila neugebauer
about 25 years with Berkeley Rep
podcast
Hear Michelle talk about 25 years with Berkeley Rep (3.6MB mp3)
LN: You, I believe, had your first professional role here back in 1983. Could you share a bit about your earliest memories of this place—about what the world of the company was for you then?
MM: It was an extraordinary experience to be able to hop out of grad school directly into a resident theater company, which was sort of the style of many resident theaters around the country—they actually had resident companies that were employed for an entire year. And you were given maybe three to four roles a year—also understudy assignments. And it was an extraordinary experience for a brand new actor to get right in with professionals on the stage, and also there was a wonderful booth there, where the stage managers sit during the performances, and I haunted it. I spent almost three years with my nose pressed to the glass, watching the professionals out there doing that stuff. I had given myself, for some reason, five years as an apprentice. I made it up. It was something that I thought was necessary to becoming a full-fledged actor. [LN: This is what you invented for yourself?] I did indeed. And so for the first three years I apprenticed myself, unbeknownst to anyone who was working here with each of them. I ended up finishing my apprenticeship at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival working with that company.
LN: And so after some time out there you said that you eventually found your way back to these parts, and back into this theater—
MM: Oh, I did.
LM: I wonder if you would speak about what specifically in the culture of art-making here brought you back—What did you find here that you didn’t find elsewhere? What about this place fed you as an artist?
MM: See, it is just…to me it is my artistic home. I got birthed here on stage. And I love this theatre. There’s something about it. And I don’t know…Sometimes when I go to theaters—they each have their very own different personality, and any new artistic director always brings their own reality and slant on life into the mix. But I sometimes think that the founders dream and vision overrides everything—or underpins it. Undercurrents it, or something. And there’s just something about Berkeley Rep that I love. I love to come here and do shows. It’s exciting—they can be challenging in ways…I just…I wanted to be part of theater that matters somehow.
LN: You know I was listening to Tony speak the other day about the importance, here, of locating the work, “in the world’—and I was sent back to that when I read that after doing Homebody/Kabul you in fact went to Afghanistan. I’m so curious to hear you speak about how it was that work sparked this venture in the world for you…
MM: Now mind you this was right after 9/11, and I had broken some ribs on that day falling down the stairs, trying to protect my kids from whatever was about to be seen on the TV. I slipped and in my own fashion managed to break a couple of ribs. And while I was recuperating I got to thinking about what matters in life and I decided theater was probably not one of the things that was most important right now. So I had decided secretly to quit acting. And the day I made that firm decision I got a call from Amy Potozkin, and she said, “Hey, you know we’re looking for someone…it’s last minute. We need you here in about five days. Can you audition? Could you send a tape up? For this play called Homebody/Kabul.” I’d never heard of it. I was out of the loop and I thought it meant like some lady who lived at home and made shoes or something. I didn’t know what to…[laughing] I had no idea what it was about, you know? I was at home with my baby twins and I just wasn’t paying attention to the world around me. And so I read it and I was just about to…I told my husband I couldn’t do it, I was going to leave theater, and he said, “Babe, I’m sorry, I don’t know why, but I think you have to do this show.” And it changed my life. So I’m glad I did.
You know the decision to quit acting did not…did not take root firmly like an oak tree, luckily. But what did take root is that I don’t want to waste my life, energy and periods of time doing things that don’t really matter to me. And working here always matters, because I know that the engine, the current engine driving this—Tony—cares a great deal about the world, and society, and the workings of things, and making things better. He’s trying to better this community. He just reaches out, and as I’m just learning today more and more about the education program that reaches out into the community, and that is so exciting and extraordinary, and that’s what I think theater originally was—that kind of reaching out into the society in an effort to improve conditions and clarify things.
LN: Well, my hope then would be to hear you speak a bit about your current work here. How is it that we might locate Heartbreak House in Shaw’s world—or in our world today?
MM: It’s the wonderful, charming home of the Hushabyes. And the eccentric, wonderful people that live there are…the war is really not even spoken about. Because they are going along with their lives, and so on, and it’s a little unreal to them, and so on. And it just reminds me very much of our own situation. We have a more engaged association with an ongoing war than I believe…the war had not yet hit England, until during the play, during the course of our play. So England had not been attacked by then. But it’s the people who are so involved in all their activities and their thoughts and their discussions, and they’re reading, but, meanwhile, the world is going to hell in a hand-basket.
You look around, you listen to the news, you listen to what various senators or representatives or high government officials have to say, and you think, you know, the same thing that I think as I watch these people: What are you thinking about? Look around you, take note, see what’s going on. There are things to be done—important things to be done.
It’s like with the Shakespeare stuff—it’s about human beings, and all the wonderful playwrights like Shaw just kind of stab into the jugular of humanity, and it’s the humanness that they address. And unfortunately it doesn’t seem to change a lot.
heartbreak house resource list
Bernard Shaw: The One-Volume Definitive Edition by Michael Holroyd
George Bernard Shaw’s Plays by George Bernard Shaw (Author) and Sandie Byrne (Editor)
George Bernard Shaw Vegetarian Cookbook by Dorothy Bates
A Short History of World War I by James L. Stokesbury
Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror by Richard A. Clark
At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the C.I.A. by George Tenet
The Perfect Summer: England 1911, Just Before the Storm by Juliet Nicolson
