2004-2005 Season: Major Barbara
It is hard not to be enthralled by Major Barbara, a play that brings to life one of George Bernard Shaw’s most lovable and inspiring characters, a big-hearted young woman with very human passions...and uncompromising ideals. With his genius for combining high comedy and big ideas, the Nobel Prize-winning playwright manages to make us laugh and think at the same time.
Major Barbara raises some thorny issues about religion, war, politics and social justice and questions the very notion of idealism. Barbara, a Salvation Army major, believes she can convert her father, a seemingly amoral realist and Europe’s richest arms manufacturer. Yet, in the course of three acts, as Shaw skewers a parade of fools and hypocrites, Barbara wrestles with the complex and disturbing relationships between religion, government and business.
All the characters ultimately find themselves face to face with the most vexing and perplexing question of all: must one give up idealism to make the world a better place? As timely now as when Shaw wrote it nearly a century ago, Major Barbara is a true classic.