Misalliance

About

Shaw's 1910 play is essentially a long conversation about everything — parents and children, marriage and freedom, class and talent — that breaks into farce when a Polish acrobat and her partner literally crash through the greenhouse roof in their airplane. The play exemplifies Shaw at his most casually brilliant: a series of encounters and arguments that don't resolve so much as exhaust their positions and leave everyone slightly changed. Misalliance has fewer famous speeches than Man and Superman but a similar quality of charged theatrical intelligence, and the character of Lina Szczepanowska — the acrobat who challenges every social category — is one of his most striking female creations.