Misalliance

An unexpected airplane crash, a house full of strong personalities, and a rapidly shifting tangle of attraction and argument set the stage for one of George Bernard Shaw's most spirited comedies.

At the country home of wealthy underwear manufacturer John Tarleton, an apparently ordinary summer afternoon is already complicated. Tarleton's daughter Hypatia is engaged to the aristocratic but uninspiring Bentley Summerhays, while the older generation confidently dispenses opinions about marriage, family, business, and how the younger generation ought to live. Then an airplane crashes into the garden.

From the wreck emerge two unexpected visitors: Joey Percival and Lina Szczepanowska, a daring Polish acrobat whose independence, physical confidence, and refusal to behave according to conventional expectations immediately disrupt the household. Attractions shift, engagements become less certain, and almost everyone discovers that the people around them-and sometimes their own desires-are not as predictable as they imagined.

First performed in 1910, Misalliance uses the familiar setting of the English country-house comedy to examine a society undergoing rapid change. Shaw turns courtship into a collision of ideas about class, gender, marriage, education, business, family authority, and personal freedom. Parents attempt to instruct their children, children reject the lives planned for them, and men and women repeatedly discover that attraction has little respect for carefully constructed social arrangements.

Hypatia and Lina provide two particularly striking challenges to conventional expectations. Hypatia is restless with the comfortable existence available to her and hungry for a life containing greater risk and possibility. Lina, accustomed to danger and disciplined by her profession, requires neither protection nor permission to determine her own course. Through them-and through the men alternately fascinated, threatened, and bewildered by them-Shaw plays with assumptions about masculinity, femininity, independence, and desire.

Yet romance is only one part of the argument. Beneath the flirtations and reversals lies a broader generational conflict. Shaw's characters debate how people should be educated, how families exercise power, what wealth can provide, and whether inherited conventions deserve obedience simply because they are familiar. Even the prosperous Tarleton household, seemingly secure in its assumptions, proves vulnerable to revelations from outside the comfortable world it has created.

Fast-moving, argumentative, and filled with Shaw's characteristic wit, Misalliance is a comedy in which almost every certainty is open to challenge. The airplane crash provides the afternoon's most spectacular collision, but the more consequential collisions are between love and convention, youth and authority, independence and expectation. By the end, Shaw has transformed one chaotic gathering into a provocative question: how much of the life we lead is genuinely chosen, and how much has simply been chosen for us?