Assessment: A amazing chat fest at A Sounds In, courtesy of George Bernard Shaw

Figures are by no means at a decline for terms in the plays of George Bernard Shaw. What the French connect with “esprit d’escalier,” or staircase wit, to refer to people moments when the perfect rejoinder is assumed of only just after it’s too late, is not an encounter that typically afflicts his hyper-articulate crew.

Shaw’s “Misalliance,” now in revival at A Sound Within just in Pasadena, features the pleasures of brilliant chat. It’s a wordy perform, functioning near to three hrs. The plot, which consists of the crash landing of an airplane and an armed intruder out to settle a family members score, is just about all speak.

Shaw at first subtitled his perform “A Debate in 1 Sitting.” Recognizing the duration of the proceedings, he included an author’s notice saying that the curtain will be reduced two times for the audience’s usefulness. There is only just one intermission at A Noise Inside of, but the sparkling dialogue keeps the engage in galloping apace.

“Misalliance” may not be the greatest of Shaw’s disquisitional dramas. “Heartbreak Residence: A Fantasia in the Russian Way on English Themes,” an argumentative condition-of-the-nation play with eccentrically drawn characters of Chekhovian complexity, signifies the pinnacle of the playwright’s achievement in this style.

Shaw was still performing out in “Misalliance” the musical structure he would fantastic in “Heartbreak House.” Social concerns are taken up and then authorized to recede, returning like themes in a symphony without the need of worry for resolution. The joy is in the participate in of concepts, the eternal back and forth of opposing viewpoints, the variation of intellectual motifs in a recurring sample.

The engage in considerations the connection of moms and dads and small children. Shaw’s focus is on the instruction of the young era, not for social or skilled status but for human success and the enrichment of modern society.

The conflict concerning the younger and the aged is explored in the context of social class. The aristocracy, the moneyed center course and the working inadequate are set aspect by facet to see which could have the generational gain.

Playwriting for Shaw served as a kind of political weblog, a repository for his extensive-ranging pondering, generously dispersed amongst a cross-portion of people. This might seem dry but it’s really scintillatingly entertaining, many thanks to Shaw’s keen intelligence, verbal virtuosity and spry theatrical instincts.

“Misalliance,” as the title indicates, revolves close to the question of relationship. This disputatious sociopolitical drama is cunningly packaged as a passionate comedy.

At stake in the plot is the future happiness of Hypatia (Erika Soto), the cost-free-considering daughter of wealthy underwear manufacturer John Tarleton (Peter Van Norden). She’s engaged to Bentley Summerhays (Josey Montana McCoy), the effete son of Lord Summerhays (Frederick Stuart), a previous governor of a British colony.

But she is not certain that Bentley’s aristocratic refinements are more than enough for her. She appreciates his brain but would like additional brawn. Extra than nearly anything, she would like to live her lifestyle as “an lively verb” and not as a prisoner of respectable morality.

This longing is answered when Joseph Percival (Dan Lin) can make an unexpected emergency plane landing that shatters the Tarletons’ greenhouse. His passenger, Lina Szczepanowska (Trisha Miller), a Polish acrobat in disguise as a man, will save the working day with her brief motion and no-nonsense fearlessness.

As all the males slide madly less than the spell of the audaciously heroic Lina, Hypatia decides that Joey, the man who just fell out of the sky, is meant to sweep her off her toes. So what if he’s an aged pal of her fiancé’s. About that gun-toting intruder (played by Joshua Bitton), not to fear — the fabulously athletic Lina has him included.

Trisha Miller, Josey Montana McCoy, Peter Van Norden, Dan Lin in “Misalliance.”

(Craig Schwartz)

The engage in will take place at the Tarletons’ classy household in Surrey, handsomely imagined by scenic designer Angela Balogh Calin. The problems of “Misalliance” have not expired, but the milieu and time period of the enjoy ought to be highly regarded, and on this rating specially Guillermo Cienfuegos’ staging succeeds. I drove to Pasadena but felt transported to Edwardian England.

The generation opens on a fairly cartoonish note. Riley Shanahan as the square businessman son of Mr. Tarleton, and McCoy as the exasperatingly “overbred” Bunny (Bentley’s nickname) overplay their variance to vivid comic effect but at the expense of subtlety. (Shaw’s comedy works best when actors participate in their humorous roles as straight as achievable.)

But the revival finds its groove at the time the veteran actors take around. Van Norden, a dab hand with Shakespeare, is a pure for Shaw. Deborah Strang as Mrs. Tarleton beautifully balances the character’s conscience and conventionality. Stuart imbues Lord Summerhays with somber suavity.

All three mom and dad are dogged by misgivings and regrets about their kids. On the subject of his romantic relationship with his sons, Lord Summerhays confesses to “a kind of remorse about the way we shake arms.” It’s the sort of majestically phrased remark that obviously takes place in Shaw’s dialogue and shifts the play’s emotional weather.

Soto, who was a profitable Beatrice in Cienfuegos’ manufacturing of “Much Ado About Nothing” at A Sounds Inside of previous 12 months, is outstanding below. Her Hypatia, the spoiled ingenue turned rebel, is wild and wayward nevertheless battling a worthy struggle. “Men like conventions because guys produced them,” she declares with annoyed sanity, building apparent she will not uphold what crushes her independence.

Miller’s glorious Lina, a female who rejects bourgeois propriety as beneath her, is a single of Shaw’s great comic creations. She worries the other people even a lot more robustly than Hypatia to move out of their minds and into their bodies, prescribing physical workout as a remedy for life oversaturated with phrases.

Lina offers the truest illustration in the play of how to are living independently, with courage and heart. She’s an emissary from a different globe, a mismatch with the people of “Misalliance” and all the a lot more appreciated for demonstrating them an choice they never dreamed existed.