George Bernard Shaw’s ‘Heartbreak House’ gets a tenderly luminous revival at Glendale’s Antaeus

George Bernard Shaw’s “Heartbreak House,” receiving a wonderfully lucid revival from Antaeus Theatre Company, appeals to people who don’t always appreciate Shaw’s cerebral style.

It was the playwright’s favorite of his works for complicated Shavian reasons. But for ordinary theatergoers, the attraction is fairly basic. The characters of “Heartbreak House” put the lie to the notion that Shaw’s overmastering intellect leaves little room for emotion in his plays.

“Heartbreak House” is as brainy as any of Shaw’s great comedies of ideas, including “Mrs. Warren’s Profession,” “Major Barbara” and “Pygmalion.” But the debate taking place in “Heartbreak House” is diffused among an ensemble of English eccentrics who wear their hearts on their sleeves.

Subtitled “A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes,” the play takes a Chekhovian attitude toward the British drawing-room comedy. Instead of forcing plot onto his amorously hapless characters, Shaw explores leitmotifs in a playful, contrapuntal fashion.

“The Cherry Orchard,” Chekhov’s final masterpiece about the various ways characters dodge and defy the end of an era, looms large in “Heartbreak House.” But the dramatic architecture is designed along musical lines.

If there’s one criticism to be made about this new production, directed with buoyant fluency by Antaeus Artistic Director Nike Doukas, it’s that the country manor setting doesn’t suggest the nautical vessel that Shaw prescribes. The lovely, economic scenic design by Angela Balogh Calin graciously makes room for the play’s wall-to-wall witticisms, but the house is meant to symbolize the ship of state drifting dangerously toward the rocks.

Alex Barlas, Alberto Isaac, Henri Lubatti, Carolyn Ratteray and Jocelyn Towne in “Heartbreak House” at Antaeus Theatre Company.

(Craig Schwartz)

Shaw wrote “Heartbreak House” during World War I, having started the year before the great conflagration and only getting the idea for the ending as German Zeppelins started raining down their fire on England. He was determined to let his theatrical ideas move in a free-form, fantasia-like manner. But the badminton game of clever talk he sets in motion isn’t lacking in higher purpose. The play, as his preface makes clear, offers a snapshot of “cultured, leisured Europe before the war.”

“Heartbreak House” is a sprawling work, and few companies could handle its loquacious demands with the finesse of Antaeus. Doukas’ company is strong across the board, but two actors stand out: Elinor Gunn, who plays Ellie Dunn, the young woman who receives an unsentimental education during her stay at the house, and the superb Harry Groener, who plays Captain Shotover, the 88-year-old retired sea captain and maverick inventor, who has lived too long to stand on pretense.

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Lady Utterwood (Carolyn Ratteray), Shotover’s daughter who married a British colonial governor, has returned home after a 23-year absence. She’s offended by her father’s brusque, dismissive, unpaternal ways. But her carapace of bourgeois respectability allows her to navigate the bohemian, free-thinking wonderland that she escaped for a more conventional life.

Hesione Hushabye (Jocelyn Towne), Lady Utterwood’s sister, lives at the house with her ineffectually philandering husband, Hector (Henri Lubatti), and so is accustomed to its iconoclastic madness. Indeed, she epitomizes the topsy-turvy spirit of the place. And she has invited Ellie for this visit in the hope of talking her out of a loveless marriage to a financially secure older gentleman.

His name is Boss Mangan (Bernard Addison), and he’s a business associate of Ellie’s father’s and a representative of predatory capitalism. As such, he’s assured of a similar fate to that of the burglar (Alberto Isaac) who arrives to rob Lady Utterwood’s diamonds and ends up blackmailing his victims, who would rather face anything than a tedious bureaucratic legal process once he’s been caught.

Such is the inverted morality of this world that Hesione is relieved to learn that Ellie has in fact arranged an assignation with the handsome Hector, who has flirted with the young woman under a flagrant alias. Hesione knows that no woman can resist her husband, a debonair fabulist, and she’s encouraged that Ellie’s romantic side is still alive.

Also on the scene are Mazzini Dunn (Arye Gross), Ellie’s self-effacing father, who’s too innocent to defend himself against corporate sharks like Boss Mangan, and Randall Utterwood (Alex Barlas), Lady Utterwood’s brother-in-law whose passion for her rules his idle aristocratic life. Nurse Guinness (Amelia White) looks after this carefree and rather careless set, serving as a no-nonsense nanny to adults who need a firm grasp, a good cup of tea and perhaps a regular tucking-in.

The English period setting is conjured simply with an area rug, a sofa with a few throws and pillows and a draftsman table for Shotover’s wild engineering ideas. There are a few nautical suggestions, but they’re easy to miss and the field has been cleared for scintillating conversation of which there is a seemingly inexhaustible supply.

The delectable talk is smoothly conducted by Doukas, though it might seem to the uninitiated completely rudderless. But that also happens to be part of the play’s point. As European society indulges its whims, the continent hurtles unthinkingly toward a devastating war.

Elinor Gunn and Harry Groener in “Heartbreak House” at Antaeus Theatre Company.

(Craig Schwartz)

The heart and soul of the play is Ellie’s spiritual romance with Captain Shotover. Their connection deepens as Gunn’s brisk, headstrong yet educable Ellie (a 20th century Jane Austen heroine) and Groener’s weary, wise and affectionate Shotover compare notes on the cultivation of a soul, which Shaw knew to be an expensive luxury but one that should never be bargained away for material gain.

Their colloquy, tenderly rendered, illuminates the enduring emotional wisdom of “Heartbreak House,” which questions how one should live in a world careening toward darkness. Shaw lampooned the heedlessness of these gadabouts, but he admired their nonconformity and applauded their courage.

As our 21st century world rushes toward ruin, I can’t help being grateful for living in a town that has cultivated an ensemble of actors capable of rising to the level of Shaw at his heartfelt best.