Theatre in Review: You Never Can Tell (Pearl Theatre Company/Gingold Theatrical Group)

	Sean McNall, Emma Wisniewski. Photo: Al Foote, III

Summer is waning, but a holiday air prevails at the Pearl, where You Never Can Tell is casting an impudent and amused eye at the follies of thoroughly reasonable people forced into thoroughly unreasonable situations thanks to the disruptive power of sex. Sometimes called George Bernard Shaw's Shakespearean comedy (a comment that would surely set him spinning in his grave) and more accurately his response to the frivolities of The Importance of Being Earnest (written two years earlier, in 1895), this gleeful satire of Victorian potboilers can be a tricky proposition to get right; I've seen it twice before -- including a starry Broadway revival in the '80s featuring the likes of Uta Hagen, Amanda Plummer, and Philip Bosco -- but in neither case did it fully satisfy. Here it gets just the handling it needs from director David Staller, New York's resident Shavian expert.

You know you're not in the world of Major Barbara or Mrs. Warren's Profession when the curtain parts to reveal a man virtually mounted on a woman in a dentist's chair. It's all thoroughly respectable, however: He is Valentine, who just opened his practice in a fashionable seaside resort, and she is Dolly, his first patient. The extraction is a success, but the results are fateful. The alarmingly candid Dolly is one half of a set of 18-year-old twins; completing the set is her brother Philip, and together they enjoy terrorizing polite society with their candid observations. For example, Dolly grills Valentine down to the last detail of his life; when he admits he isn't married, she snaps, "Of course, anybody can see that." Philip takes to characterizing Valentine's profession as "ivory snatcher" and "gum architect."

Dolly and Philip were raised under the loving, yet negligent, eye of Mrs. Margaret Clandon, late of Madeira, and the authoress of a series of up-to-the-minute treatises on modern life. They include such titles as Twentieth Century Cooking, Twentieth Century Creeds, Twentieth Century Conduct, Twentieth Century Parents, and Twentieth Century Children. "No household is complete without them," says Philip, adding, "We came to England to get away from them." Mrs. Clandon has been far too busy advising the world on how to live to shepherd her own unruly brood. "We prefer people with unimproved minds. Our own minds are in that fresh and unspoiled condition," says Philip.

Dolly and Philip are a bellwether of any production of You Never Can Tell; meant to be equally charming and intolerable, too often they are only the latter. As played by Emma Wisniewski and Ben Charles, they make a perfect pair of screwball comic terrors. Wisniewski's fair face darkens like a thundercloud before releasing another remarkably rude comment; when Valentine, upset at having unwittingly offended them, says that he feels like a beast, she snaps, "That's your conscience, not us." Whether dressed in white for the seaside or gotten up like Pierrot for a fancy-dress ball, Philip delivers everything with a flourish. "No man alive shall father me," he announces grandly, when suddenly presented with the possibility that such a parent may be in the offing. Told to shut up, they ostentatiously zip their lips, holding their mouths closed tight in an apparent act of contrition.

"Here you find a family enjoying the unspeakable peace and freedom of being orphans," says Philip -- but not for long. As it happens, Mrs. Clandon's youthful marriage was a brief, but unmitigated, disaster, and she quickly decamped for Madeira and the literary life. Little does she know that her husband is near at hand; indeed, he is Valentine's wealthy landlord, a shipbuilder named Crampton ("Cockeyed Crampton" to his friends). As played by Bradford Cover, he is a blowhard through and through, with a lasting sense of grievance over what he sees as Mrs. Clandon's treachery; one look at her and her offspring, and he is apoplectic at the prospect of this mortifying family reunion. Later, prompted by an English sense of duty, he makes an attempt at legally seizing control of his children, but, as Finch McComas, the Clandon clan's lawyer, notes, "This family is no place for a father."

Mrs. Clandon has another child, Gloria, billed by Philip as "the woman of the twentieth century" and by Dolly as "nature's masterpiece." The human distillation of her mother's theories, she is both a beauty and a formidable force of will who, unlike the conventional stage heroine of the day, always says exactly what she means. "I obey nothing but my sense of what is right," she says. "I respect nothing that is not noble. That is my duty." As such, she is perfectly poised to lay waste to any social situation. (Shaw gives her an especially amusing first scene, in which she demands to know her father's identity, noting that, for example, she had to turn down a proposal from the first officer of their steamer from Madeira, on the grounds of her unknown parentage. Dolly and Mrs. Clandon deftly do away to that idea, remarking that the first officer proposed to each of them, too.)

Valentine thinks of himself as a practiced "duelist of sex" ("I learned how to circumvent the Womens'-Rights-right woman before I was 23."), but his assurance goes off the rails in Gloria's presence. As played by Sean McNall, his conversational skills suddenly fail him, and he is reduced to speaking in nonsense syllables. Given the Gloria of Amelia Pedlow, it's easy to understand why; she combines stunning looks with a manner designed to wilt anyone who has the nerve to cross her. Their scenes of wooing -- written and staged more like a series of military sorties -- are among the most delightful in the production.

But then, just about everything works in Staller's confident staging, right up to the champagne toast finale. (The scene changes are especially wittily staged, including one in which the action appears to be a hallucination experienced by Crampton under the influence of the ether in Valentine's office.) Robin Leslie Brown's Mrs. Clandon is immensely likable despite, or maybe because of, her imperious manner; Dominic Cuskern is the very model of outraged propriety as Finch; Dan Daily exudes sweet reason as Walter, the waiter who discreetly stage manages the action and whose secret sorrow is that his son is a successful, highly paid lawyer; and Zachary Spicer wraps up the action in fine style as Walter's son, a true bully who steamrolls everyone into accepting a happy ending.

Harry Feiner's scenic design embraces the aesthetics of the era, providing a Victorian show curtain covered with advertisements for local businesses, a painted drop for the scene set in Valentine's office, and a lovely impressionist seaside backdrop for the scenes set on the hotel's terrace and inside Mrs. Clandon's suite. Barbara A. Bell's costumes concentrate on the Victorian silhouette, eschewing any fancy ornament; nevertheless, Pedlow's third-act entrance in white-and-blue satin ball gown elicited a couple of gasps from the audience at the performance I attended. M.L. Dogg's sound design provides some seaside sound effects and charming musical interludes. If I have any reservations about Stephen Petrilli's lighting design, it's that his occasional use of blatant cues to suggest changes in the characters' emotional states is a tad overdone; of course, the responsibility for this really lands with Staller.

But this is only a small misstep in an otherwise thoroughly sparkling evening. Shaw wrote You Never Can Tell in part to prove that he could generate an audience-pleasing commercial success. More than a century later, his achievement still stands.--David Barbour