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Idealizing war, love
SMCM performance of Shaw play proves functional and funny
Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2009
 Click here to enlarge this photo Photos by BRENDAN O'HARA
Melissa Mercer plays Raina in George Bernard Shaw's "Arms and the Man," which is being presented by St. Mary's College of Maryland.
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While it would seem that humans should have experienced enough trench warfare and stalemate by 1885 to understand that war and sport were not one and the same, pivotal characters in George Bernard Shaw's "Arms and the Man," which is set during the Serbo-Bulgarian War, have yet to put it all together.
Shaw, on the other hand, who wrote the play in the 1890s, seemed to have a clear notion of how such conflicts would culminate in the next century. In "Arms and the Man," which is named after the first line of Virgil's epic poem, "The Aeneid," the playwright conveys his misgivings through farce — namely, by poking fun at people the likes of Major Sergius (Ian Prince), who toward the end of Act 2 shouts out his epiphany (or was it Shaw's?) that life itself is exactly that.
Beyond a technical gaffe and some flubbed lines, St. Mary's College of Maryland's theater, film and media studies department's opening night performance of "Arms and the Man" offered little to criticize. Rather, in the hands of college, Shaw's comedy proved to be as functional as it was funny.
Before the play started, recorded patriotic music filled the newly renovated Bruce Davis Theater, as the lights slowly faded to black. When the lights rose back up over the bedroom (a set backed by a beige wall and silky curtains) of 23-year-old Raina (Melissa Mercer), in came her mother, Catherine (Briana Manente) to announce the beginnings of a wonderful war, one her husband, Major Paul (Tobias Franzén), is away waging for the Hungarian army.
In came Captain Bluntschli (Eric Horwitz), a professional Austrian soldier working for the wrong team, crashing through the window, waving his pistol … which is not even loaded. Rather than cough him up to the good guys, Raina feeds him chocolates and convinces her mother to let him spend the night.
Even still, she's not falling for her "chocolate cream soldier" just yet. She remains awestruck by her fiance, Sergius, the bravest soldier of them all, she thinks. And even though Bluntschi knows him and compares his war prowess to that of Don Quixote, Raina is not yet ready to embrace Bluntschli's radically realistic worldview.
After a peace treaty and the return of Paul and Sergius, Raina tries to maintain the charade, as difficult as it is. One issue, among many, is that Sergius is in love with the family servant, Louka (Katerina Floradis), who is only pretending to be engaged to the family's second servant, Nicola (Nick Huber). As well, Bluntschli makes a sly return, and finds the good graces of the majors by drawing out their war strategy.
Though compared to Don Quixote, Prince's explosive manner of portraying a character lacking a single funny bone, not to mention any understanding of irony, seemed to conjure Sacha Baron Cohen. His costume (a handle bar mustache and military uniform with gold shoulder pads and a feather pom) was worth a laugh by itself. He made the audience laugh even harder, though, when he would clamp his boots together, face the audience and just blurt something. (It is hard to imagine that one sentence of his dialogue ended with anything other than an exclamation point.)
In the face of it all, Horwitz was Michael Cera, waging battles at a low volume with passive-aggressive wittiness.
Mercer, meanwhile, managed to go the whole play without much altering the pitch of her character's forced tone of nobility. With lines like, "Do you know, sir, that though I am only a woman I am as brave as you?" she mainly deserved credit for keeping a straight face.
Actors, all told, took full advantage of the play's one-big-joke design, which allowed them certain liberties. They could be 19th or 21st century, American or European, subtle or over the top, in character or, for a spell, maybe even out of character — and I think Shaw would have liked how the whole thing unfurled.
If you go
Directed by Michael Ellis-Tolaydo, St. Mary's College's theater, film and media studies department's production of George Bernard Shaw's "Arms and the Man" will conclude at 8 p.m. Nov. 19-21 and at 2 p.m. Nov. 22 in Bruce Davis Theater. Tickets are $4 and $6. Call 240-895-4243. E-mail boxoffice@smcm.edu.
