Mrs. Warren's Profession

The McCarter Theater's season continues with George Bernard Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession, which was scandalous enough in 1902 that it was banned from the stage in England (and then in America in 1905). This is not because his title character was a prostitute, it was because she was a prostitute and defended her line of work.

Of course, the play isn't so much about prostitution as it is about the "new" woman of the time. There are two main characters in the play--Mrs. Warren, who escaped poverty by becoming a courtesan and then managing a number of brothels throughout continental Europe, and her daughter, Vivie, with whom she's had little contact over the years. Vivie is newly graduated from Cambridge, lives independently, smokes cigars and shakes hands vigorously. She is a proto-feminist, but looks askance at her mother's trade. But then, in the conclusion to Act II, Mrs. Warren tells her daughter how she came to be what she is, explaining that for a woman born in poverty it was her only option, other than going to work in a white-lead factory and dying a miserable, early death.

Vivie buys that explanation, but when she learns that her mother is still in the business and has no intention of retiring, she priggishly breaks off with her, and the play ends with a heartrending scene of a daughter denying her mother.

The production at the McCarter is top-notch, with excellent acting and impeccable direction. I can't think of a thing I would do differently. All of the comic elements are handled perfectly, especially by Edward Hibbert as Mrs. Warren's friend Mr. Praed. Hibbert, known to many as Gil Chesterton from the TV series Fraser, effortlessly handles his character's brio, and occupies a certain moral center, as he pointedly expresses that he knows nothing of "that side" of Mrs. Warren's life. Not so Sir George Crofts, played with effective menace by Rocco Sisto. He at first thinks he may be Vivie's father, and satisfied he isn't, means to make her his wife. He certainly represents a backward-looking attitude toward women.

As the two lead characters, Suzanne Bertish is terrific as Mrs. Warren, all hats and grand entrances, while Madeleine Hutchins is also solid as the unforgiving Vivie. As Vivie's suitor, and possibly much more, Michael Izquierdo is suitably squirrely.

I should note though, that if this production is impressively mounted, I found myself detached from it. Shaw's work, I've felt since I was introduced to it in college, leans much more to the intellectual. He did, after all, in an epilogue to Pygmalion, tell us that Eliza ends up with Freddy, not Professor Higgins. Mrs. Warren's Profession ends with a teary, soap-opera-ish ending, but instead of being moved I regarded it more with a clinical eye. I don't think this is the fault of the performances or the direction, but rather the text itself.