Word: hypatia
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...dramatic form to its limit of sustained conversation with minimal action, achieving both the benefits of perceptive, amusing communication among well-conceived characters and the problems of occasional monotony. In response to her talkative father's hesitant admission that "there's nothing more to be said," the spirited Hypatia ends the play with a resounding "Thank goodness." This declaration provokes the audience to laugh with gratitude for a pleasurable evening and relief that it has ended at last...
...Misalliance, first produced in 1910, St. George Bernard Shaw goes forth to slay the dragon of family life with his own jawbone. The two renowned fathers in the play are exposed as shameless old rips, their sons and daughters as scamps with serpents' teeth. The emancipated heroine, Hypatia Tarleton, says, "I just don't want to be bothered about either good or bad. I want to be an active verb.'' Actually, she and the others are passive wordlings caught in a brilliant, bottomless Edwardian conversation pit. But if the people are stationary, the props are animated...
...buoyantly performed, a happy tour de farce. Donald Moffat, in the role of John Tarleton, the self-taught underwear tycoon, is the image of Shaw's young old man, the drawing-room atheist who quotes his chosen gospels: "Read Ibsen. Read Dickens. Read Whatshisname." As his daughter Hypatia, Frances Sternhagen seems to have been born with a riding crop in hand and the conviction that the pursuit of a mate is the most exciting form of fox hunt. James Greene is cringingly comic as a socialist underdog who yearns to bite the hand that feeds...
...less content with the four young people. Faye Dunaway's Hypatia Tarleton (the Young Thing) shouts and mouthes her lines magnificently--rather like the tutored Eliza Doolittle. But a shout seems to be the limit of Miss Dunaway's acting capabilities, and she is less than arch, more that dull. As her original suitor, Jere Whiting is determinedly effeminate (he can shout, too); Robert Moulthrop, her eventual choice, must be a stout fellow, but his Etonian ways do not convince. The fourth one, William Gordy, Hypatia's brother, barks gruffy; he is not a little tedious...
...characters present contrasting points of view: John Tarleton Sr. (Jerry Kilty), a prosperous underwear manufacturer and a representative of the middle class, would revolt against his day to day life for one of ideas; his son (Miles Morgan), a middle class moralist, "likes to know where he is;" daughter Hypatia (Helen Mareey) fights against her middle class associates who sit around and "discuss whether what other people say is right;" and Lord Summerhays (Thayer David) represents traditional English aristocracy...