Heartbreak House

Theatricum Botanicum continues the 2012 Repertory Season with George Bernard Shaw’s comic masterpiece, Heartbreak House. Theatricum artistic director Ellen Geer directs the Nobel Prize-winning author’s "Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes" for Theatricum’s outdoor stage in idyllic Topanga Canyon.

In Heartbreak House, ridiculous aristocrats, idiosyncratic suitors and iconoclastic women grapple with unlikely romance in a world on the brink of war. Young Ellie Dunn (Willow Geer) is invited to the country home of the eccentric Captain Shotover (William Dennis Hunt) by his daughter Hesione (Melora Marshall). Soon the entire family, including Hesione’s husband (Mark Lewis) and sister Adriadne (Susan Angelo), is divided over Ellie’s decision to marry her father’s business partner (Alan Blumenfeld) for money rather than love.

A web of escalating events results in unlikely unions, unwanted complications and untimely explosions – both metaphorical and real. But despite the brilliant debates about politics, economics, desire, war, education, religion and science, they are all ignoring the greater cloud that is looming.

On Fridays Aug. 31, Sept. 7 and Sept. 14, Theatricum will serve "British Pub Grub" dinners in the theater’s adjacent gardens at 6:30 pm, followed by an 8 pm performance. (Separate admission, or combination packages available.)