Word: utterword
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Hesione, in all the ripeness of mature beauty, wears a dress which is the seductive red of the proverbial apple of Eden; Ellie Dunn, when we first meet her, wears the green of spring and undeveloped innocence; while Ariadne Utterword--Hesione's cold sister who expresses a desire "to be respectable, to be a lady"--dresses in the whiteness of false modesty and conventionality...
...ancient Captain Shotover who drinks "to keep sober" and displays beneath his pachydermatous appearance a tender heart and all the wisdom of the playwright himself. Although Shotover is the ultimate source of chaos, confusing Mazzini Dunn for Billy Dunn, ignoring the arrival of his long-lost daughter Lady Ariadne Utterword and spewing forth random comments as he wanders aimlessly on and off the stage, the Captain is the only one who remains oblivious to the frenzy of Heartbreak House: "I've stood on the bridge for 18 hours in a typhoon," he declares. "Life here is stormier...
OTHER performances show slightly less breadth of character but serve adequately to evoke a single, focused personality. While Anne Ames tends to overdo her portrayal of the salacious socialite Lady Utterword, she successfully represents the haughty conservatism of the old English upper class. Doug Kruse's Mazzini Dunn evinces the innocence and naivete of a man taken in by Mangan but fails to provide the minimal amount of dynamism necessary to cast him as the idealistic political orator for the revolutionary movement...
Jacqueline Tabachnick, as Hesione Hushabye, handles these passage well, especially her speech at the end of Act I. She does nearly everything else well, too; her scene with Ellie and the sleeping Boss Mangan is the show's finest comic moment. Susan Schwartz (Ellie Dunn), Pat Fay (Lady Utterword), and Joseph Boyd (Randall Utterword) are competent performers, who only occasionally suffer lapses of concentration...
There are some better performances among the seven stars. As Shotover's indescribable daughter Hesione, Diana Wynward is splendid, and Pamela Brown is at least intriguing as her sister Ariadne, Lady Utterword. (They are not the "demon women" Hector describes, but that is Shaw's fault more than theirs.) Ellie Dunn, who begins as a romantic ingenue and becomes one of the quietly scary, hard-as-nails young women only Shaw could create, is played well enough by Diane Cilento...
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