"BANG! BANG!" screams a crewmember from the back of the theater. A pretty girl on stage, stifling a smile, reacts to the sound effects. She jumps away from her stage window and away from the battle that is taking place in the streets of her small Bulgarian town.
Exactly 150 years after George Bernard Shaw was born, U.Va.'s drama department is performing his play Arms and the Man. Set during the 1885 Serbo-Bulgarian War, the comedy tells the story of a young Bulgarian woman, Raina Petkoff, as she comes to grips with the realities of love and life.
The play begins with a brief musical sequence that quickly sets the comedic tone. The audience soon meets Raina, an idealistic young girl from a wealthy Bulgarian family. Her mother, Catherine Petkoff, enters the bedroom to tell Raina of the victorious battle in which Raina's betrothed, Sergius, led the cavalry charge.
Soon after Catherine leaves the room, a soldier bursts in, pointing a (unloaded) gun at Raina and begging her to guard him from the Russian army. Bluntschli is a Swiss mercenary in the Serbian army who arms himself with chocolate instead of ammunition. Raina is intrigued by his honest opinions about the war that she so romanticizes. When her father and fiancé return from the war, Raina must confront her illusions and decide what it is she truly wants.
Guest artist Edward Morgan, associate artistic director at Milwaukee Repertory Theatre, is directing Arms and the Man and teaching classes in the drama department this fall.
"He is very intense, very smart, hilarious. He is specific about how he works with actors," Joel Grothe, who plays Bluntschli, said.
The musical score, which adds a lively introduction to each act, is mainly the music of Russian composer Peter Tchaikovsky. A costumed run crew sings the Bulgarian national anthem, "Mila Rodino," after the intermission, bringing the audience back into the world of the play.
George Bernard Shaw, a witty Irish playwright and political activist, uses satire and humor to shatter the illusions that surround love and life. Though Arms and the Man is set in Bulgaria, Shaw wrote the play as a statement about England, where he spent much of his career.
"All of the characters in the play are outsiders. They are all Shaw in a way. There's something in Irish literature and theatre about being an outsider," Grothe said.
Shaw displays his usual wit in this hilarious play, but the humor does not mask the political importance of his work. Even in modern times, when the public is inundated with war images, society is no less impressed with seemingly valiant, if fictional, tales of war.
The period piece is "surprisingly relevant to our world today," Morgan said.
The play exposes timeless human emotions. Shaw does not deny that soldiers are consumed with fear or that a privileged girl can feel doubt about everything in her life in which she wishes she could believe. The cast of Arms and the Man truly shows the complexities surrounding such issues as love, pride and war. In the end, victory is won with words, not arms.
Arms and the Man runs Nov. 15-17 and 29-30 and Dec. 1-2 at 8 p.m. in the Culbreth Theatre.
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