Theater Reviews—

Long Wharf Is Offering What Everyone Needs Right Now: Shaw, Laughter & Romance

By Julie Stern

NEW HAVEN — On Saturday Night Live last week New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani told the country that it was all right to laugh again, despite the tragedy of September 11 and its aftermath. With that in mind, there is perhaps no better opportunity to escape the anxieties and uncertainties of the present than to go to New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre and lose oneself in the merriment and silliness of George Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man.

Written in 1894, two decades before the simmering hostilities of the fragmented Balkans would lead to the bloodbath of the Great War, Shaw’s play uses a battle between the Russian-led Bulgarians and the Austrian-led Serbs, as a background for a spoof on the upper-class tendency to romanticize war.  With a head full of ideas about the glamour of battle, drawn straight from operettas, Sergius Saranoff,  a Bulgarian major, leads a reckless cavalry charge against a regiment of Serbian machine guns, and wins the day — temporarily,  because the machine gunners have mistakenly been given useless ammunition.

Shortly afterward, a remnant of the Serbian unit flees to the town where Saranoff’s fiancée lives. Before he can be butchered in the streets along with his fellow soldiers, Captain Bluntschli, a Swiss professional who happened to join the Serb army, escapes by climbing up to the balcony of the lady in question, Raina Petkoff, and throws himself on her mercy..

Although Raina is proud of her father, the highest ranking Bulgarian officer, and imagines herself devoted to her “heroic” Sergius, she is intrigued by the manners and attitude of the self-effacing stranger, who proclaims himself a coward who hopes to avoid death, and confides that, being a professional soldier with 12 years of hard experience, he stuffs his cartridge belt with chocolate rather than bullets.

The rest of the play revolves around Raina’s attempts to get her proud parents to accept her change of heart, finding a suitable replacement/love interest for Sergius in the person of the spirited housemaid, Louka, and having everyone shed their pretensions and illusions in favor of acknowledging their true thoughts and emotions.

Done well, with a good cast, the play can be absolutely hilarious, and happily, that is exactly what goes on in New Havan. Long Wharf subscribers were left hanging last spring when acclaimed artistic director Doug Hughes abruptly quit during an internecine struggle with the company’s board of directors. Fortunately his replacement (and former assistant), Greg Leaming, directs with a deft hand. Without being as sumptuous as some of season openers from recent years, Arms and the Man captures the Shavian style perfectly — clever, witty and rollicking at the same time.

Mark Nelson radiates bemused intelligence as the Swiss captain  in a performance reminiscent of  a young Walter Matthau, Sarah Knowlton mixes imperiousness with uncertainty as Raina, Patrick Page is over the top as the Bulgarian major consumed with the sense of his own honor, and Dana Slamp is daringly outspoken as the maid Louka, who is out to prove she does not have the soul of a servant.

Shaw, the master of both language and character, does not deal in stereotypes, and it soon becomes apparent that everyone in this play has meaningful things to say, about life, love, war, human nature, social class, and pretensions. Though the situations are droll and farcical, audiences have also enjoyed for years the underlying substance, without even thinking very much — which, of course, is what everyone can use from a theater right now.

One more point: Judy Gailen’s scenic design is up to Long Wharf’s high standards from years past. Light and airy like Balkan folk art, it makes wonderful use of a window with changing backgrounds, while re-creating three very different rooms in the Petkoff home. Watching the stagehands transform Raina’s boudoir into a garden courtyard, complete with coleus plants and laundry draped over the bushes, during the interval between scenes, is a dramatic treat in itself.

(Performances of Shaw’s Arms and The Man continue through October 21, with evening shows Tuesday through Saturday and matinees each Saturday. Call for curtain details and ticket information, 203-787-4282. Long Wharf Theatre is at 222 Sargent Drive.)