THE STORY: Based on the novel An Unsocial Socialist by George Bernard Shaw, the story centers on Sidney Trefusis, a millionaire Socialist who leaves his bride on their wedding day because he fears his passion for her will get in the way of his plans to overthrow the British government. Sidney vanishes “underground” - disguises himself as a common laborer called “Mengels” - and infiltrates Alton College, a girls’ school where well-bred young women are “fitted and fatted to be put on the marriage market.” His plan: Take over the school and plant the seed of radical Socialism into the fertile brains of the future consorts of cabinet ministers and kings. What he doesn’t plan on is the presence of one Agatha Wylie, a sixth-form rabble-rouser, who falls hopelessly in love with both Sidney and his politics, and just happens to be his deserted wife’s cousin. Love triangles, mistaken identities, Marx, Engels, pistols and the proletariat jostle for position in this adaptation of Shaw’s last comic novel, written in 1883.
“SMASH is witty, cunning, intelligent, and skillful. It is also generous, something cleverness isn’t always. Like Tom Stoppard, the author makes you the audience feel just as clever as he. Brillliant writing.” —Seattle Weekly.
“SMASH is a wonderfully high-style British comedy of manners that evokes the world of Shaw’s high-minded heroes and heroines, but shaped by a postmodern sensibility…The result is uncanny, a hybrid with two voices that, depending on your reference points, either feels like the practice of channeling or more like a well-thought-out (albeit posthumous) artistic collaboration.” —Seattle Herald.
“The story mixes equal parts political comedy with comedy of manners…it is a sparkling evening of Shaw for our post-Stoppard age, with loads of clever wordplay and impassioned debate about the structure of society and the preferred form of change…a fine evening out in high Shavian fashion.” —Backstage West.
