By Bill Marx

Overall, this is a satisfying production of a turn-of-the-century play that still underlines enduring economic inequity.

Mrs. Warren’s Profession by George Bernard Shaw. Directed by Eric Tucker. Staged by Central Square Theater at 450 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, through June 29.

Nael Nacer, Melinda Lopez, and Barlow Adamson in the Central Square Theater production of Mrs. Warren’s Profession. Photo: Nile Scott Studios.

Director Eric Tucker’s snap, crackle, and pop take on Mrs. Warren’s Profession was inspired by HBO’s Succession, and the script’s internecine power struggles fit snugly on David R. Gammons’s sterile boardroom set. Mysterious graphs of stock activity are projected overhead, and there is a laptop along with e-cigarettes. But George Bernard Shaw’s 1893 play is also a battle for possession. Who will claim the brilliant young graduate Vivie Warren as their own? Her mother, Kitty Warren, the owner of a string of highly profitable brothels? Her oily business manager, the wealthy Sir George Crofts? Or Vivie’s man-child lover, Frank Gardner? Yes, the depredations of capitalism are condemned, but what is at stake is the future. What path should a free-thinking young woman at the turn of the century take? Where do her loyalties lie? Love? Money? Art? Family? None of the above? Shaw does not provide an alternative to what is depressingly on offer in his first dramatic triumph (Widowers’ Houses is clunky and The Philanderer a weird jape aimed at Ibsenites). Ironically, this play featuring people with lots of money is more about subtraction than addition, though underneath it all is the perennial Shavian question — how are we to make the best use of the life force within us?

The Central Square Theater production taps into that contested life force with sufficient vim and vigor, applying touches of cutthroat passion to the task, led by Barlow Adamson’s soft-spoken reptile George Crofts, whose come-on to Vivie is as smugly demeaning as it is feral. The other performances are generally dexterous, from Nael Nacer’s sleek and self-satisfied Praed, Shaw’s playful poke at well-meaning but naïve aesthetes, to Evan Taylor’s helter-skelter romancer, Frank Gardner. His is an eccentric treatment of the role — Gardner is usually portrayed as churlishly childish; his is a case of arrested development, an anxious-to-be-pampered guy who says whatever is on his mind. Taylor’s brat comes off, at times, as an anarchistic creature — explosive, pouty, opportunistic. The portrait does not quite gel, but it is interesting to watch, supplying some startling payoffs.

Those expecting familiar psychological revelations in the central conflict between mother and daughter, Kitty and Vivie, nuanced cracks in the women’s veneers, will be disappointed. Shaw is rejiggering the mechanics of Victorian melodrama: there is no love between mother and daughter because they are essentially strangers to each other. This is not so much an emotional confrontation as an exposé of positions of power available for women in a male-dominated society that is anything but transparent.

Kitty initially wins Vivie over by arguing that prostitution was an understandable alternative to working for poverty wages, which is all that working-class women could get. But then things switch. Which offer will the daughter accept? Dutiful caretaker to a wealthy patron who — through the sex worker biz — is making the rich richer? Or a woman on her own who refuses to accept tainted money? As Kitty, Melinda Lopez conveys the character’s vulnerability — her need for a daughter as a helpmate — rather than her proud managerial power. More could have been done with the contradictions between the figure’s strengths and weaknesses. Luz Lopez usually strikes the right notes as Vivie, a woman whose strongest desire is to be a cog in the corporate counting machine, spending her time off smoking a cigar and reading a mystery.

Melinda Lopez and Luz Lopez in the Central Square Theatre production of Mrs. Warren’s Profession. Photo: Nile Scott Studios

There are drawbacks, particularly jittery stutters and stops in the staging’s rhythms. The boardroom set makes moving around awkward for the performers (how many times can a character sit on a table?); some of the dialogue is fired off so quickly we miss the humor and/or the point (Shaw insisted on the musicality of his lines); Wesley Savick is too staggeringly broad at times as Reverend Gardner, the play’s punching bag for religious/masculine hypocrisy; the F-bomb is silly, but the animal growls used to silence Gardner are terrific.

Overall, this is a satisfying production of a turn-of-the-century play that underlines enduring economic inequity: we live in a country where, in 2023, women working full-time, year-round, earned 83 cents for every dollar a man made. Here’s a pertinent observation from a program note Shaw wrote for a 1933 production of Mrs. Warren’s Profession: “It is amazing how the grossest abuses thrive on their reputation for being old unhappy far-off things in an age of imaginary progress.”

A Shavian (in spirit) Polemic:

The play’s ending is wonderfully sour — a tragicomic stalemate. Vivie breaks away from her exploitative mother and parasitic lover, but she chooses isolation, preferring to eke out an existence on her own rather than accept money from the prostitution industry. This is not your usual feel-good celebration of female “empowerment.”

Tucker was wise to take his directorial cue from Succession — this is a play about the corruption of unfettered capitalism and a class-ridden, transactional society. Though the era maintained a more respectable veneer than what we see today, corruption now is out in the open, even to the point of being admired. But Shaw, the Fabian socialist, is not just condemning wage slavery — he is evaluating the meaning and purpose of work. Mother and daughter are united by their iron-willed pragmatism and determination to earn their own keep. In Kitty Warren’s case, riches are generated by a chain of brothels, while Vivie turns her back on that for an honest — if less well-remunerated — job. Neither can see that work (and the inheritance of wealth) can help undo the economic injustice that each so clearly perceives.

Shaw dramatized his solution at the end of his 1905 masterpiece, Major Barbara. In that play, the assets of an international munitions mogul are accepted by daughter Barbara and Cusins, her fiancé and a professor of Greek. The latter asks, “Dare I make war on war?” Barbara agrees that together, they should work to use the funds to dismantle an industry dedicated to making profits from death and destruction.

Inspired by that question, I ask the creative industrial complex: “Dare we make war on autocracy, on censorship, on ignorance and misinformation, on the normalization of criminality?” In a moving talk at the end of the production I attended, Lee Mikeska Gardner, artistic director of the CST, pointed out that the company’s NEA grant had been withdrawn. She called for additional financial support. Anyone who cares about sustaining live theater — particularly small companies vulnerable to Trump’s hammer blows — should respond generously. But theater companies of all sizes, in Boston and elsewhere, are under attack from this administration. They should consider taking collective action: gathering together to fight against the increasing power of a troglodytic agenda determined to dictate what we see, read, and think. There is strength in numbers. Dare we make war on Trump’s war on culture? This is not a time to carry on with business as usual — a deal with the devil that Shaw rightly condemned 132 years ago.

Bill Marx is the editor-in-chief of The Arts Fuse. For over four decades, he has written about arts and culture for print, broadcast, and online. He has regularly reviewed theater for National Public Radio Station WBUR and The Boston Globe. He created and edited WBUR Online Arts, a cultural webzine that in 2004 won an Online Journalism Award for Specialty Journalism. In 2007 he created The Arts Fuse, an online magazine dedicated to covering arts and culture in Boston and throughout New England.