Mark Landis brings George Bernard Shaw's masterpiece of farce to the University Theatre stage. The alliance here is of the oldest sort: an engagement. In this case, the two families don't entirely object. But are these two young "lovers" really right for each other? It's a question that might have been avoided until an airplane makes a crash landing right in the middle of things. What happens next in Shaw's wry comedy reminds us, and its zany characters, that the only certainty about life is that it is always unpredictable.
From the Author's Preface:
The strongest, fiercest force in nature is human will. It is the highest organization we know of the will that has created the whole universe. Now all honest civilizations, religion, law, and convention is an attempt to keep this force within beneficent bounds. What corrupts civilization, religion, law, and convention (and they are at present pretty nearly as corrupt as they dare) is the constant attempts made by the wills of individuals and classes to thwart the wills and enslave the powers of other individuals and classes. The powers of the parent and the schoolmaster, and of their public analogues the lawgiver and the judge, become instruments of tyranny in the hands of those who are too narrow-minded to understand law and exercise judgment; and in their hands (with us they mostly fall into such hands) law becomes tyranny. And what is a tyrant? Quite simply a person who says to another person, young or old, "You shall do as I tell you; you shall make what I want; you shall profess my creed; you shall have no will of your own; and your powers shall be at the disposal of my will." It has come to this at last: that the phrase "she has a will of her own," or "he has a will of his own" has come to denote a person of exceptional obstinacy and self-assertion.
George Bernard Shaw