Playwright: St. John Hankin
At: ShawChicago at the
Ruth Page Theater, 1016 N. Dearborn
Phone: 312-587-7390; $15
Runs through: Feb. 2
BY CATEY SULLIVAN
Washed-out shades of Oscar Wilde and underwritten echoes of George Bernard Shaw make up the flimsy foundation of St. John Hankin's The Cassilis Engagement, an unsubstantial comedy unworthy of the substantial talents of ShawChicago. Why ShawChicago Artistic Director Robert Scogin selected this piffle for his company's winter offering is a bafflement.
At a preview performance of ShawChicago's reader's theater treatment of The Cassilis Engagement, the pace occasionally sputtered, but timing isn't the core problem in this set-, costume- and prop-free production. The root trouble is one of substandard material: The characters are mere types, and the dialogue apes but never comes close to achieving the sparkling wit or satirical verve that defines Shaw or Wilde. And where Shaw skewers his targets with the accuracy of an atom-splitter, Hankin's targets are never clear. He frowns on everybody, depicting the upper classes as snooty, superficial, hypocritical and duplicitous and the lower classes as vulgar, superficial, coarse and uninterested in widening their limited intellectual horizons. No one in the story elicits any sympathy and as a result, it's difficult to give a single fig about the machinations of the gossamer-thin plot.
The titular engagement is between dashing country gentleman Geoffrey Cassilis ( John Francisco ) and pretty London commoner Ethel ( Leslie Ann Handelman ) . Horrified at her son's selection in a bride, Adelaide Cassilis ( Mary Michell ) and her sister, Lady Marchmont ( Adrienne Cury ) , scheme to kill the romance with kindness. When Ethel and her shrill, déclassé mother, Mrs. Borridge ( Diane Dorsey ) , arrive for an extended visit at the Cassilis estate, an underhanded, impeccably mannered war is waged on the have-nots.
If any of the characters were filled in to be more than mere cartoonish types, the scheming might be great fun. As it is, however, it's devilishly difficult to engage with the shenanigans on stage. As Mrs. Borridge, Dorsey is no likable underdog—she screeches and mugs like an over-the-top version of Eliza Doolittle's long-lost cousin. As for Michell's Adelaide, she's bland as rice pudding and altogether too much of a non-entity to be believable as the maternal Machiavelli the script demands. As for the ingénues, Francisco instills Geoffrey with a poignant earnestness that truly charming even if it is utterly unbelievable that he would fall for a girl as disagreeable as Handelman's Ethel.
It's Tony Dobrowolski as the proudly disreputable Major Warrington that instills The Cassilis Engagement with its one bit of bracing gusto and as such, it's unfortunate that Major Warrington is only in a few scenes. Would that Hankin had written The Warrington Engagement—then we might have a story worth telling.
