Shaw and tell

Thoroughly modern Mrs. Warren

by Bill Rodriguez

Mrs. Warren's Profession isn't the titillating drawing room comedy that other turn-of-the-century British dramatists might have come up with. The world's oldest profession attracted George Bernard Shaw not for its prurient interest but for how it exemplified one of the world's oldest problems: economic exploitation. Likewise, in two other early "unpleasant plays," as he called them, he placed a pair of social abuses under the harsh glare of the footlights: maintaining slum poverty rather than providing decently for the poor, in Widowers' Houses; and "the grotesque sexual compacts" marriage forces upon women in The Philanderer.

Shaw didn't treat prostitution with nudges and winks -- he had a brothel proprietress unashamedly defend the common sense of whoring rather than starving, and refused to bring the disapproval of society crushing down upon her at the final curtain. Consequently, the 1893 play had to wait a dozen years before getting a public performance, thanks to the censor's ban. This was so even though not a single beaded bag was twirled at a single street lamp. The play mainly deals with a long-delayed confrontation between Mrs. Warren and her daughter Vivie, whom she has had well educated and raised oblivious of the business her money was coming from.

Making the concerns of the witty but wordy playwright come alive for a modern audience is the current challenge of Trinity Repertory Company. A proscenium stage has been constructed in the upstairs theater, thrusting Mrs. Warren's Profession out at us like the fist Shaw was shaking at Victorian society.

The director is Brian McEleney, a veteran actor with the company and co-director of Trinity Conservatory. In the title role is Anne Scurria, who has been performing at Trinity since 1979 and, incidentally, was in the first class to graduate from the conservatory. Her roles have ranged from the brooding Lady Macbeth to the manic Frosine in Molière's The Miser. They spoke recently after a rehearsal. Here are some excerpts.

Q: When you researched the period for background on Shaw's concerns, were there any surprises for you?

McEleney: For me the surprise was that he never really deals with prostitution. We talk about it a lot, but we never see her working or in her own environment. She's in her daughter's environment for the whole play, so it kind of relieves some of the danger. We discovered that we had to try as hard as we could always to put that kind of dangerous life there. Because by putting it all in the daughter's summer house he's kind of given us all an escape hatch, to make it be a charming social event.

Scurria: One thing that surprised me is how accurate he is. We got some material from the Huntington [Theatre, in Boston, which is also staging the play]. They very generously shared some of the articles and things that they found. It's just incredible, in reading some of the books on prostitution at that time, there are women who say exactly what she's saying. It's almost as if [Shaw] has a dramaturg. I can't imagine that he went out and interviewed people. But he's really right on: it was a matter of practicality; it was one of the only opportunities that was available for women to make money.

Q: So much of the furor in its time was over Mrs. Warren being given the stage, being unapologetic, without being condemned by the author. This is such an honest presentation.

McEleney: And Shaw is not only looking at Mrs. Warren. There are five other characters in the play. He's doing the same thing. One of his purposes is to take the audience's expectation about what they think Mrs. Warren should be, and then she's something else. They expect her to be this come-hither tart, and she turns out to be a really great businesswoman. They see this churchman who turns out to be interested only in money and social position . . . They look at Vivie [Mrs. Warren's daughter]; he sets up our expectation that she is going to be the heroine of they play, and she turns into this almost parody of the modern woman. He tried to write about what a modern woman was like, and how does she deal with human issues. She has a lot of trouble with human issues.

He's not just asking about prostitution, he's asking on a lot of levels what is a modern woman, what would the world be like if women did have work, did have opportunities. What would that mean about work, what would that mean about motherhood and family? Questions that we're still asking.

Scurria: And why does society make people put on masks? That's still going on today. There are a lot of girls who are brought up still, even though they might go to college, to marry a rich man. That's how our economic society still works. In theater today, many men [are resentful] because the girls, they figure, will get married, but the men, how are they going to support themselves? There's so much that's still the same.

Q: Do you think the play is weakened by the moralistic tone, by Vivie turning away from her mother in self-righteousness indignation?

Scurria: Well, I don't, because what she says is true, which I think is brilliant about the play. Because neither of them is right, ultimately . . . I think it increases the tension between the arguments in the end, and ultimately there is nothing else to say.

McEleney: What Vivie is objecting to is not that her mother is a prostitute but that her mother is running brothels. Shaw -- or Mrs. Warren, at least -- paints a very rosy picture of what that is. But she is making money off of young women.

Scurria: Enslaving young girls for my own profit.

McEleney: They've got their legs in the air and she's making money off of them. Just as bad as any man or any pimp.

Scurria: But it's all through the play. The scene with George Crofts [played by Timothy Crowe] is great because he says if you're going to get down to only talking to people who only get money from worthwhile things, you're not going to be able to talk to anybody. Because my brother who's an MP, he gets his money from a factory where girls are starved and make six shillings a week. So are you not going to talk to him, or are you not going to talk to the Pope?

Q: Is there any shock value left for audiences today, since we're rather blasé about the subject. For example, could it ruffle feathers still for some in the audience to blame it on economic circumstances?

McEleney: We did a lot of talk about that. We do tend to be blasé about sex. But women at that time didn't have access to the economic life of their times. Women have more access in our day, but we have a whole subculture of African-American, inner-city black men who make their living selling drugs because they don't have access to the life that the bourgeois middle-class takes for granted. If you have your choice of working for minimum wage at McDonald's or making $15,000 a week, what are you going to do? And if our society denies people real access to economic equality and opportunity, then we can't be surprised when they do something illegal to make the money. We have the same feelings about drugs as they had about prostitution -- it's the great social evil of our time.

Mrs. Warren's Profession is at Trinity Rep September 24 through November 7.