Alvin Keith as Praed and Karen Ziemba as Kitty Warren in the Gingold Theatrical Group revival of Bernard Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession, a once-shocking comedy the Lord Chamberlain refused to license for London performances at the end of the 19th century.
Kitty Warren, title character of Bernard Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession, is a madam with heart, though not the proverbial heart of gold. As a single parent, she’s prepared to spend any amount of money to shield her daughter from society’s censure; but she doesn’t intend to abandon her own lucrative career as a sex worker.
Frank (David Lee Huynh) forces a little frivolity on the businesslike Mrs. Warren.
Director David Staller has cast Karen Ziemba as Kitty in the Gingold Theatrical Group’s revival of this 1894 play (banned in many places when new). Staller, the company’s artistic director, is our nation’s foremost Shavian, at least outside academia. His choice of Ziemba, a bona fide musical-theater star, is unexpected but ingenious. Whether by instinct or direction, she strikes an inspired balance of vulgarity and restraint, and makes Shaw’s aging blackguard sympathetic as well as funny. During 130 years this role has attracted a host of distinguished actresses including, in New York, Ruth Gordon, Uta Hagen, Dana Ivey, and Cherry Jones. Ziemba is a welcome addition to that list.
Kitty, however, isn’t the play’s protagonist—that function belongs to her daughter, Vivie (Nicole King). Described by Shaw as a “real modern woman of the governing class,” Vivie has just completed undergraduate studies in mathematics at one of the new women’s colleges of Cambridge University, achieving first-class honors in the final-year exams. She’s aiming for a career as actuary and lawyer. Shaw famously visualized a feminist age ahead, and he meant this “new woman” to be the coming era’s literary avatar.
Educated apart from her mother since early childhood, Vivie is troubled by how little she has been told concerning her provenance (and especially parentage). “Who are you?” she rails at Kitty. “I know nothing about you.”
“The cast of pros sails through Shaw’s resplendent script.”
In the course of the play, Vivie discovers not only who her mother is but how she evolved. With scant education, plus a low-class accent and a lack of polish, teenaged Kitty faced the choice of earning a pittance by drudgery or being a prostitute. She found the latter “far better than any other employment” open to her; and she succeeded spectacularly, eventually becoming proprietor of pleasure palaces in Brussels, Vienna, Ostend, and Budapest. She also developed a talent for polemics, craftily justifying her years of renting out her body and trafficking others to do the same.
In the play’s most famous speech, Vivie asserts that the “people who get on in this world are the [ones] who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them, make them.” Vivie isn’t referring to her mother in that passage, but no audience member is likely to miss Shaw’s implication that Kitty is the embodiment of Vivie’s philosophy, and that daughter and mother are more alike than either realizes.
Huynh with Nicole King as Vivie, Mrs. Warren’s daughter, in Shaw’s classic.
The Gingold production is reminiscent of modestly staged, frugally budgeted summer stock. As in effective summer stock, the cast of pros sails through Shaw’s resplendent script, guided by Staller’s light touch at the helm, while the designers do a lot with little.
Nicole King, making her Off-Broadway debut, handles Vivie’s complicated lines with élan, giving this brainy “modern woman” a degree of self-possession Shaw would applaud. David Lee Huynh brings impish humor and plenty of juvenile energy to Frank Gardner, Vivie’s flibbertigibbet suitor. Raphael Nash Thompson finds surprising complexity in the character of Frank’s father, Reverend Samuel Gardner, who had an affair with Kitty suspiciously close to the time Vivie would’ve been conceived.
As an unscrupulous baronet doing his damnedest to bulldoze Vivie into marriage, Robert Cuccioli is amusingly droll and suitably odious. And Alvin Keith is engaging as Praed, an artist friend of Kitty’s and an extraneous wheel on Shaw’s dramaturgical vehicle.
Asa Benally’s costumes charmingly evoke the 1890s with indifference to accuracy of period detail (many garments look as though they come from the actors’ own closets).
Scenic designer Brian Prather provides a single, unchanging background for the play’s four locales: shelves and crannies draped with vines and cluttered with found objects (all interesting, some distracting). A few ballroom chairs and a couple of tables get shifted about to represent various furnishings. While the chairs are being rearranged between scenes, sound designer Frederick Kennedy entertains the audience with recorded melodies, peppily performed with period instrumentation. Kennedy’s zippy music complements the tempo of Staller’s direction, which emphasizes speed and fluidity above all. This Mrs. Warren is a little less than two hours of Shavian beguilement that doesn’t have an intermission and doesn’t need one.
GTG’s production of Mrs. Warren’s Profession runs through Nov. 20 at Theatre Row (410 W. 42nd St.). Evening performances are at 7 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday and at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday; matinees are at 2 p.m. Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday. There is a special matinee on at 2 p.m. on Nov. 17 that will bump that Wednesday evening’s performance to 8 p.m. For tickets, COVID guidelines, and information, visit gingoldgroup.org or the Theatre Row box office.
