Interview with Emily Mann

Emily Mann

In September, Literary Manager Carrie Hughes spoke with Director Emily Mann about her early thoughts on her production.

CH: Why do Mrs. Warren’s Profession now?

EM: It is just the right moment for this play, but there’s never a wrong moment to do one of Shaw’s plays. He wrote Mrs. Warren’s Profession, he said, not only about “the oldest profession,” but about women and for women. And could there be a more wonderful moment to hear his words? Having heard Sarah Palin’s speech the night before last, and having come back from the Democratic Convention in Denver a week ago, I realize both parties are talking about the fact that it’s now time for women. But it’s always been time for women! Shaw wanted to get that on the British stage as clearly as possible, as often as he could.

To me, the play is really a mother/daughter play. On the one hand, it’s a play about a single working mother and her daughter. It’s a rather tough-minded story at the end of the day. The mother who neglects her child and then demands love when she wants it may find it’s not there. The daughter starts out the play full of life (her name is Vivie, after all!) and ends up turning her back on her mother, on love, on art and on joy. I can see her becoming a brittle, lonely, work-driven old lady with no one to love and no one to love her. It’s a chilling ending. What happens when you neglect your child, no matter how much you believe in your work? Both pay the personal price.

On the other hand, it’s a clear-eyed and passionately political play, and Shaw does not shrink from any of the issues he brings up. He had the audacity in 1895 to compare the condition of married women with prostitution! In this play nobody is all right and nobody is all wrong. Each side is both right and both wrong, and the play brings up, as all great plays do, more questions than answers.

CH: Can you talk a little bit more about the balance in this play between the political ideas and the personal?

EM: It is about the balance. I think that Shaw was such a great craftsman; he’s taken care of the politics. My job in directing the play is keeping it deeply human. Nobody wants to be lectured to. I’m making it alive, emotionally true, and multi-layered, as I would with any great play, whether it’s by Shakespeare, or Chekhov, or Nilo Cruz.

Shaw has said that the villain of the piece is the society—the hypocrisy in the society, the classism in the society, and the poverty that was absolutely grinding and nearly impossible to break out of, especially for women in his day. And Shaw manages to make it entertaining! As Shaw said: “My way of joking is to tell the truth. It’s the funniest thing in the world.”

CH: What draws you to Shaw?

EM: Well, he’s one of those wonderful writers who wrote real women really well. I think that is one of the reasons I’m so drawn to Shaw—his women are astounding. They are often very smart, which was unusual on stage for his day, and very passionate. I think he understood women. Vivie and Mrs. Warren are two of the great female characters created by a dramatist in the past couple of centuries.