Mrs. Warren’s Profession

Play (1893)
by George Bernard Shaw
Directed by Eric Tucker, Bedlam
Central Square Theater
May 29 – June 29, 2025

Scenic Design: David R. Gammons; Costume Design: Leslie Held; Lighting Design: Jeff Adelberg; Sound Design: Nate Tucker

With Barlow Adamson (Sir George Crofts), Luz Lopez (Vivie Warren), Melinda Lopez (Mrs. Warren), Nael Nacer (Praed), Wesley Savick (Reverend Samuel Gardner), Evan Taylor (Frank Gardner)

Vivie Warren (Luz Lopez), recently graduated in mathematics from the University of Cambridge, is on a rare visit with her mother, Mrs. Warren (Melinda Lopez), a businesswoman whose attentions have taken her away from many of the duties of childrearing. Nonetheless, Mrs. Warren has provided Vivie with an excellent education and Vivie is now embarking on post-university endeavors involving work, and to some extent, romance. She is caught up in the latter with Frank Gardner (Evan Taylor) in some fashion, though Frank’s disposition, orientation and involvements are somewhat complicated. Showing up on the scene, apparently at Mrs. Warren’s invitation, is the middle-aged but handsome and debonair Praed (Nael Nacer), perhaps with an interest in guiding Vivie’s affections. But, showing up as well is Mrs. Warren’s business partner, Sir George Crofts (Barlow Adamson), who also takes a liking to Vivie. On the scene, and adding any number of emotional and historical complications, is Frank’s father, Reverend Samuel Gardner (Wesley Savick), who appears to have an interesting history with Mrs. Warren and is on somewhat less than congenial terms with his own son.

There is a lot of complication going on in this small engagement of characters, some of which comes out in the wash and some of which is never made very clear.

It is certainly the case that Vivie knows relatively little about her mother, and what ensues enables her to get a much better picture of where her mother has come from and where she is situated. This does lead to some significant interactions between Vivie and Mrs. Warren and essentially provides the fodder for the denouement. How Vivie comes to sympathize with her mother’s early life and to have less sympathy for her later life is what gives structure to this moral tale. In the final scenes, how Vivie and Mrs. Warren detail and uphold their points of view gets strong and vivid depiction and the two actors, Melinda Lopez as Mrs. Warren and Luz Lopez as Vivie, give a persuasive account of the conflict.

Mrs. Warren’s business relationship with Sir George Crofts is also a mystery to Vivie until she has a quite frank discussion with Crofts. That long interaction, in this production, gives these characters a good opportunity to articulate their viewpoints and the actors here also rise to the occasion admirably. Crofts’ appeal to Vivie on marital grounds is a bit of a mystery, but it certainly adds a curiously perplexing dimension to Shaw’s social commentary.

The character of Frank is a bit stuck in the middle of things and one does wonder why Vivie has attraction for him at all. He seems to walk a few very thin lines and one comes away feeling that he may well be headed for a life of some difficulty. His apparently sincere attraction to Vivie seems complicated by other dalliances, and one gets a rather confused picture of who this character is supposed to be. Whether this is a function of the production’s choices or the play’s design is not quite clear.

There are some notably strong moments in this production, in particular those involving the long dialogue between Vivie and Crofts and between Vivie and Mrs. Warren. Luz Lopez gives a portrayal with a lot of backbone in both contexts and conveys a persuasive amount of confidence and force in her character, and Barlow Adamson, as Crofts, embodies a successful businessman with questionable character convincingly. As Mrs. Warren, particularly in the denouement, Melinda Lopez gives a convincingly pained sense of what it means to be a woman who has pulled herself up from the bottom and who now, despite the appeals of her daughter, cannot get away from where she is.

The great Nael Nacer is an asset to any play in which he appears, but here, perhaps because his character, Praed, is supplementary, he seems underused. The portrayal of Reverend Samuel Gardner by Wesley Savick is very broad, almost clownish, in stark contrast with the other portrayals which are quite restrained, and one wonders whether that were a function of the original script or were a directorial embellishment.

The set by David R. Gammons is spare but interesting, making use of a large table in the middle of a central stage for all of the action. There is a module with screens showing a lot of numbers and graphs that hangs above the stage, perhaps suggesting something about the economic contexts of the narrative.

Eric Tucker has usually done considerably wilder productions, some of them at Central Square, with greater degrees of inventiveness in staging. This is a fairly tame and straightforward production, save for the simplicity and abstractness of the set. There is something a little strange about the fact that the spoken lines are given in American accents though there are a large number of British-English idioms that come out in the dialogue, making, at times, for a somewhat odd mixture of accent and cultural idiom.

– BADMan (aka Charles Munitz)