STAGE REVIEW : Lively Lesson in Love and Marriage From Shaw

What’s on your mind?

These days, that can be a terrifying question. (The answer may be, “Nothing.”) Are audiences willing anymore to sit down and listen to characters whose heads are full of ideas and opinions--in other words, a George Bernard Shaw play?

Saturday’s audience at Occidental College’s Keck Theatre was willing, and with a Shaw play few of them had likely ever heard of before: “Getting Married.”

Marcia Rodd’s Hillside Repertory Company staging for Occidental’s summer theater festival keeps the terms of Shaw’s project--to explore the viability of the marriage contract--in mind. It knows that this isn’t any play in the usual sense, but one of Shaw’s “discussion plays,” in which the characters stand in for ideas. This is a world beyond Freud and psychology, and Rodd’s show celebrates it. In the end, that may be more daring than any of the prenuptial notions hatched in the play.

Still, listening to couples and clergy circa 1908 (when “Getting Married” first appeared, just after “The Doctor’s Dilemma” and just before “Misalliance”) try to re-invent the marriage contract and make it more equitable for women is a little startling.

Lesbia (Kathie Cole Freeman) especially feels that the accent for wedlock is on the second syllable, despite Gen. Bridgenorth’s (Lowell Thomas) stubborn wooing of her. Not far behind is Edith (Megan Freeman), who’s calling off her wedding to Cecil (Ken Clement) just hours before the ceremony, once she gets the hint that she’s about to become a house slave. Nor can Leo (Kristie Transeau) have her cake and eat it too, by marrying the snobby Sinjon (Jonathan Putnam) and having an affair with her--yes--ex-husband Reginald (Tom Shelton).

Time out, say the umpires--the friendly Bishop of Chelsea (Alan Freeman) and his right-hand man, Father Anthony (Jamie Angell). (It’s funny how, as in baseball, they’re both dressed in black.) The Bishop negotiates a kind of group prenuptial, announcing ahead of time in true Shavian form that it won’t work. He means to teach everyone that marriage, as Churchill said about democracy, is the worst system ever devised, except for all the others.

That is what Shaw means to teach too, and if he had come up with a second half to match the dazzling first (the original had no intermission, but Rodd’s show does), he might have convinced us.

What’s especially nice about this lively arena staging (smack in the middle of what would otherwise be the Keck’s orchestra seating area, with its European opera house-style, two-level balcony looming above) is the enthusiasm for a work with glaring defects.

Eventually, Shaw’s marriage disquisition gets the better of his comedic course, with the play never really ending, only limply fading out. The focus on some characters over others is blatantly arbitrary and probably wrong: for no good reason, Edith and Cecil, whose wedding is the cause of everyone initially coming together, work out their problems off-stage while Sinjon struggles with the sudden arrival of the town’s clairvoyant mayor, Polly (Lisa Robinson).

None of this, though, gets in the performers’ way. Even without Freud, these are distinct personalities, with actors to match. Kathie Cole Freeman suggests the Shavian woman in full development, while Megan Freeman devises a woman of similar potential on her way to realizing it. Shelton’s Reginald is comically all too aware of the indignities he has to put up with, and Putnam’s Sinjon is all too aware of himself before love traps him. Robinson’s performance is Shaw’s vaunted Life Force in the flesh, just as Angell’s Anthony is the Life Force bottled up.

In either case, they speak like people worth listening to.

At 1600 Campus Road, Eagle Rock, on Wednesday and Friday, 8:30 p.m., Sunday, 2 p.m., July 31, 8:30 p.m. Call for Aug. schedule. Ends Sept. 1. $10-$15; (213) 259-2772.