Candida, a Triumph of the Heart, Mind and Soul

Step in to the Two River Theater house and you instantly feel welcomed into a living space - albeit one from the 19th century - that actually feels lived-in. There is an immediacy to the atmosphere for the audience, a feeling that they are quite at home in the home of clergyman James Morell, a central figure in George Bernard Shaw’s Candida. 

There are stacks of books and loose papers everywhere, coats and hats and scarves hung without care at the door.  Statues and knick-knacks find ill-places to sit, under desks and on high shelves. In short, the stage, for this story, first produced at the close of the Victorian Era, 1898, is set like your livingroom and mine. 

David Staller, the director of Two River Theater’s Candida, suggested that was the very intention of the set and scenic design, and might as well be the very notion behind Shaw’s play. In order for the story to successfully unfold, and unfold successfully it does, an informal invitation must be extended into the intimacy of the lives of the characters at play within. The language and the ways of the period, properness and purity, at least assumed by modern audiences, necessitates a performance that, practically written into the work by Shaw, begs humanity on every level. 

Whereas the period was surely more tight-lipped, more restrained with subjects like human lustfullness and less-actualized human rights, certainly in terms of the rights, powers and privileges of women, Shaw writes to challenge all. Candida is one of many works by Shaw that stands at the end of an older age, while breathing life into the modern play, of course, with issues that confounded humans then and now.

Candida is a conversational love triangle, which means don’t go to the theater expecting, necessrily to see the typical carnal push-and-pull. The parties discuss their longings, the intrigue, the competitive will to win love over another with each other in closed door parlor volley or through misunderstood conversations. Indeed the woman at play, Candida is her name, doesn’t even know the game is a foot between her husband the socially conscious clergyman James Morell and a youthful poet and family friend, Eugene Marchbanks.

The two men actually experience a more heart-racing relationship in the first act than Candida does with either one of them. They, the men, verbally joust when Candida is out of the room. Yes, Shaw explodes the live triangle in the first act - revealing the subjct that is typically, secretly drawn out till the climax, to give momentum to what is more interesting therein, the candid open thoughts of people affected by the madness of the heart in a setting, a clergyman’s frontroom, that is more atuned to matters of the soul. 

The sometimes melodramatic male madness on display, loosely suits its time, as rants and raves are kept to hushed tones. When Candida is present, the men, like bad little boys bashfully cower and misunderstand the meaning of her words, her intentions. What else is new? There is humor in Candida not knowing. Her truthful and unassuming dialogue, misunderstood to power the play and the dissection of the human heart, is a bit like what we love about Shakespeare’s romantic comedies, characters lost in the woods and in themselves, believed to be someone or something other than they are, to eventually learn and leave the world of confusion, better for having been conflicted in the first place. 

When the conflict is finally uttered to Candida the result, to Shaw’s great amusement and to insist his great intent is to reveal the power and right to posses power by the woman of the play. Candida must and is given the privilege to choose between her “suitors.”

A word or three about the dynamic between Morell and Marchbanks...their discourse displays perhaps the conflict within the playwright.  Shaw, a man of letters and consciousness, was debating the power of both lofty, lustfull eloquence and deliberate intellectual correctness. There is a bit of both in Shaw, the man and his works. And the male characters that seem diametrically opposed are actually a single man in full, fumbling with equal parts of themselves, himself to better understand his place in things, his place in the heart of his woman. Therefore, defenses rise and fall. Oppoonents gain ground and immediately lose it. Humor and insight then is divined by Candida’s role, unbeknownst, as a referee, impartial by her ignorance to the conflict and game plans of the men. 

Also, curious to recognize, is the timelessness Shaw writes into the dedication both men have to their egos. Though Marchbanks is merely 18 and Morell is squarely in his middle age, the preservation of both of their egos is nearly as important as the love they both profess for Candida.

Staller, for his great effort with this work and the works of Shaw, he has been directing and directs Shaw’s full canon of works in New York at the Players Club in Gramercy Park, receives wonderful performances from his cast. 

Sue Cremin plays the title character, the hinge of the story, with grace and muscularity. Her dedication to the moment, each of them, as they blossom, creates the revelatory truthfulness in right measure for the audience to delight and appreciate Shaw’s endgame.

Candida’s two men played by Steven Skybell (Morell) and Will Bradley (Marchbanks) are equal parts as characters as well as artists. While Bradley’s Byronesque physicality and tortured, emo vocal tone initially felt false, particularly to Skybell’s earthiness, humanness, you quickly understand and appreciate where he is coming from, the actor in the character, the role of the blind, immature, unworldly heart, the poet who makes much of life, having not yet lived it. There are teenagers even of our time still rolling on the floor in fetal positions waxing about the immensity of life.

But it is Skybell’s performance that is most palpable and powerful in TRT’s production. Skybell works the emotion and intellect of the character so deftly, so genuinely that it is difficult to give any ground to any character/actor who debates or quarrels with him. His performance captivates and wins the audience over.  Though Candida is the turning point character of this triangle play, Skybell is in control of the audience’s emotion and imagination, for doing what Shaw and Staller profess within the work…the man, the human in the performance, the story, the make-believe is paramount to the mission of this art. Though Shaw gave equal time to both men, it is clear to this writer, that Shaw was leaning on and towards Morell and Skybell honors that with a strong performance, even when displaying Morell’s weakness.

The rest of this ensemble cast is in perfect pitch with the work as well. The playwright created something of a microcosm in the work, with each character owning a distinct personality that spoke to personalities of the time the play was written, but also of course of human personalities that are familiar to us even now. Andrew Boyer, Jordan Coughtry and Elizabeth Morton ably fill in the world of Candida as both comic relief and foils for the triangulated characters. Without them and their strong performances, the story lacks the multi-dimensional quality the play demands.

They are, it should also be noted, ace at capturing the British aire, the varying soceital levels and cultures within the culture of the Victorian era. Coughtry turns in a terrifically comical performance as Reverend Alexander Mill, a stuffed-shirt Brit that reminds one of a Hugh Grant performance, meant in the best possible way, quick and daft at the same time.

The story of Candida opens and closes on the sound of church bells. The audience is welcomed in in the peacefulness of morning and ushered out on the peacefulness of night. As the story closes so too do the doors on the parlor on the stage and the audience is left alone again in the darkened parlor of the clergyman, but there is something different in the air. The energy, the robust explosion of human want, need, ego and power remains suspended there. A story of human lives has carried on in all of its tenderness and frivolity.

Performances of Candida run through April 10. This production is sponsored in part by Two River’s Education Partner, Monmouth University, and Rumson Fair Haven Bank and Trust.