Mrs. Warren’s Profession

Mrs. Warren’s Profession, written by George Bernard Shaw in 1893 and first performed in London in 1902, is about a prostitute-turned-madam who attempts to come to terms with her disapproving daughter. The daughter, Cambridge-educated Vivie, lives a comfortable middle-class life shielded from her mother’s source of income. Vivie envisions herself a pragmatic and open-minded 20th-century woman until she discovers that her entrepreneurial mother, Kitty, is an unapologetically successful madam. Sensibilities clash in this character-driven dramedy about the business of pleasure, the economics of necessity, and the ties that bind…or don’t.