Undershafted
(Full length, 2M 2F with doubling.)
Undershafted is both a sequel and a response to Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara, taking up that play's chief characters and themes. Attempting the Shavian trick of enlivening a play of ideas with preposterous comedy and acrobatic wit, it nonetheless critiques Shaw's faith in human evolution and asks whether, over a century later, we are any better off.
The first act takes place in Perivale, St. Andrews in 1937, at the height of the Spanish Civil War. Adolphus "Dolly" Cusins, a.k.a. the current Andrew Undershaft, wants to supply the Spanish Republic with badly needed arms, but the Allied embargo prevents him and, in protest, he's threatening to shut the Undershaft arms works down entirely. His beloved Barbara, hoping to save the business, manipulates him into hiring Michael Tagerty, a young man who disguises his ideological opposition (and, as is gradually revealed, is the illegitimate son of a certain Irish-American ambassador and family scion). To complicate matters, Dolly and Barbara's youngest daughter, Emma, has raised an internationalist brigade and is leaving for Spain with them unless someone can talk her out of it.
The second act takes place in an afterlife suggested by the Hell of Shaw's Man and Superman. Here we find Dolly and Barbara miraculously restored to youth (played by Act One's Tagerty and Emma) and joined by Barbara's father, Andrew Undershaft (played by Act One's Dolly). He enlists them in welcoming the most recently deceased heir to the Undershaft enterprise. This turns out to be Helena, a middle-aged Amercian woman (played by Act One's Barbara). How she came to be in possession of the firm and what she did with it becomes the subject of hot debate, taking in 20th century warfare, early 21st century global politics, and millennialist Christianity, a battleground on which Barbara must face Helena before the latter is "miraculously" resurrected to do more damage.
Characters:
Act One:
EMMA
DOLLY
BARBARA
TAGERTY
Act Two:
DOLLY
BARBARA
UNDERSHAFT
HELENA
SAMPLE SCENE (from Act One)
(DOLLY enters from left, in wheelchair, pushed by EMMA.)
DOLLY
Are you still here?
TAGERTY
I was just...
DOLLY
Mephistopheles.
TAGERTY
Pardon?
EMMA
He’s not talking to you.
(DOLLY wheels himself energetically around the garden.)
DOLLY
Where did you go? Trying to get away from me? There you are again. You’ll hear me out this time or...
BARBARA
Darling...
DOLLY
Don’t you darling me! I’ve got the old bastard where I want him.
EMMA
He’s raving. He does this sometimes.
DOLLY
In love with poverty! Who was in love with poverty! Not us! We despised poverty and what it did to people! You were the one who loved poverty! Poverty causes war and war causes poverty and that’s all that mattered to you!
BARBARA
Darling...
DOLLY
Great for business! Infernal old rascal...
BARBARA
He’s not here, darling. He’s been dead twenty-five years.
DOLLY
But I just... He was... Oh. Ohhh.
(He weeps.)
BARBARA
There, there.
TAGERTY (to EMMA)
Should I go?
EMMA
He’ll be alright. This happens every now and again.
DOLLY
I let him crush me under the tank treads of his inexorable logic. Unanswerable. Unanswerable my Aussie arse! I know what to say to him. I always did!
BARBARA
Of course. Of course.
DOLLY (recovering)
Who is this young man?
TAGERTY
Michael Tagerty, sir. We met briefly, before.
DOLLY
Allow me to apologize, Mr. Tagerty. I have these spells, you see. They just come over me, and...and I rather enjoy them, truth be told. I am fully lucid now and will endeavor to remain so. You’re here about the position, I take it?
BARBARA
Mr. Tagerty is just the man we need, Adolphus. He is forthright, honest, capable, intellectually acute, deeply insightful, motivated and has his feet planted firmly on the ground.
DOLLY
Is that so?
(He looks TAGERTY over.)
We don’t want him.
(BARBARA looks at TAGERTY in alarm.)
BARBARA
But, Dolly...
DOLLY
A person of those qualities which you have named would be just right for this place. We’re looking for someone who would be all wrong. A dreamer, a romantic fool, a professor of Greek, for example...
BARBARA
He is part Irish.
DOLLY
Nothing personal, you understand.
TAGERTY
Of course. At any rate I really don’t think I’d be interested. I hate war and profiteering. This place repels me. I’m sorry, but that’s just the way I feel. Thank you for your hospitality and good morning to you all.
(He starts to go.)
DOLLY
Stay there, young man.
(TAGERTY stops. DOLLY scrutinizes him.)
I felt that way myself. I still do. It was but a short step to realizing that war and profiteering will always be with us, and that it was better to take them into my own hands than leave them to others.
(Pause. TAGERTY turns and faces him.)
TAGERTY
You may have a point there, sir.
DOLLY
Foundling?
BARBARA
His father is the American ambassador...
TAGERTY
And my mother an Irish chambermaid at the Regent Hotel. What of it? I’m not ashamed.
DOLLY
Of your father, you should be.
TAGERTY
He wants to avoid war, as I do.
DOLLY
He’s in bed with fascists, not just chambermaids.
BARBARA
Please don’t be offended, Mr. Tagerty.
TAGERTY
I do wonder if my father only objects to war against certain states.
DOLLY
That he does, Mr. Hagerty...
TAGERTY
Tagerty, sir.
DOLLY
The coming war will only be disguised as a war against fascism. The expansionist excesses of our goose-stepping friends will be curbed, so as to preserve, intact, the nationalist zeal and economic slavery which have made them so intimidating.
EMMA
Were the western powers concerned with freedom, they’d be liberating Ethiopia and Spain, instead of sitting on their hands.
TAGERTY
I couldn’t agree more.
(DOLLY looks from BARBARA to TAGERTY and back.)
DOLLY
Mr. Tagerty will be staying for lunch.
BARBARA
Can you?
TAGERTY
Well, I... Yes. Thank you very much.
BARBARA
I’ll tell Flossie.
(BARBARA goes in. EMMA makes to follow her.)
DOLLY
Where are you going?
EMMA
To tell her not to bother. Mr. Tagerty can have my place.
TAGERTY
You’re not staying?
EMMA
Well, no...
DOLLY
You’ll tell her why, Emma, won’t you?
EMMA
Shall I?
DOLLY
I’d certainly rather you not leave it for me to explain.
EMMA
I figured you would be gentler than I am capable of being.
DOLLY
You’re afraid she’ll persuade you to stay.
EMMA
Nonsense.
DOLLY
Your mother, once she sets her sights on what she wants, has reserves of will matched only, I think, by your own. I sympathize with you, Emma, in wanting to avoid that battle, but it is not fair to her, or to me. Soon you’ll be facing a worse enemy, at any rate. This will be good practice. You’ll tell her?
EMMA
I’ll tell her.
(She kisses him, then goes in.)
TAGERTY
What’s going on?
DOLLY
Our daughter has decided to go away on a little trip.
TAGERTY
Where to?
DOLLY
Sunny Spain.
TAGERTY
As a nurse, I suppose?
DOLLY
As a soldier. Leading her troops into battle.
TAGERTY
You intend to let her?
DOLLY
Do I look like I could stop her, if I wanted to? I know it’s dangerous and all that. But it’s good to see one of our children show some initiative. We’ve had seven, Barbara and I. Barbara’s enthusiasm for the procreative act is part of what landed me in this wheelchair. It took us six tries before we finally came up with something worthwhile.
(He sighs with fatherly pride.)
My little Saint Joan. I only wish I could send a few Undershaft ground-to-air obuses and tripod-mounted fragmentation shell launchers along with her.
TAGERTY
I understand you wish to pressure Parliament to rescind its embargo.
DOLLY
With Germany and Italy supporting Franco, it’s only fair.
TAGERTY
You might try disguising your partisanship and arguing from a purely economic perspective. After all, unless both sides are armed, the war will be over quite soon with no chance of anyone’s making a profit on it.
DOLLY
This from a man who hates war and profiteering?
TAGERTY
But loves to play the devil’s advocate.
DOLLY
It’s a valuable skill in this line of work. Dangerous too, for one can easily start to believe one’s own fabrications. They finally harden into a philosophy of life and work that allows one to do the indefensible.
You seem like a nice young man.
TAGERTY
Thank you, sir.
DOLLY
I cannot in good conscience allow you to step into my shoes.
TAGERTY
Why not, sir?
DOLLY
Were I to seduce you, as I was seduced, turn your own arguments against you or use mine to beat you into submission, you would hate me forever and end up wheeling yourself around this garden, arguing with my ghost.
TAGERTY
Can you allow me to choose?
DOLLY
Only if you know what you are choosing.
TAGERTY
Or what is choosing me.
DOLLY
There! The first of the tempter’s lies. It absolves one of responsibility.
TAGERTY
Or bestows upon one the highest responsibility of all.
DOLLY
That is the choice. In my position, one may choose the luxury of being irresponsible. Passively watch the guns roll off the production line and the money roll in, serene in the belief that all is as it should be. That the poor and oppressed have chosen to be that way. That if they attempt to rise it is alright for those who can afford arms to kill them, in order to preserve their own power and keep it from others’ hands. That money breathes and eats and shits and we are only instruments of its will. That the blood of those killed by its hand is not on ours. It is a wonderfully seductive argument, and in its warm embrace we who wield power can say no, power wields us, and take a nice long nap. Does that sound like a good life to you?
TAGERTY
Well, I...
DOLLY
If you say no, I must warn you that the kind of moral torpor which I have described is harder to resist than you might think. I have struggled against it since the day I first showed up to work here, and you see the shape I am in.
TAGERTY
You look alright to me, sir.
DOLLY
Nonsense! I’ve been martyred on the rack of my own apostasy.
TAGERTY
Apostasy?
DOLLY
The moment I was initiated into the Gospel of Father Undershaft I was determined his church would undergo a reformation.
TAGERTY
Of what sort?
DOLLY
I wanted to make weapons for the right people or for nobody. He told me I would have no choice, that I would be in the hands of a higher power. I believed that as the embodiment of that power we could determine its course. I had heard in a play I rather liked that to be in Hell is to drift, to be in Heaven to steer. Barbara and I have tried to raise Hell to Heaven.
TAGERTY
Have you succeeded?
DOLLY
The firm, I admit, has seen better days. Oh, I’ve been a terrible Andrew Undershaft. But it’s been worth it just to try and prove him wrong.
(To the unseen UNDERSHAFT:)
Do you hear that, Mephistopheles?
TAGERTY
Sir...
DOLLY
To give arms to all men who offer an honest price for them, that’s what you said, infernal one! Well, I set that price at what an honest man can afford and what a scoundrel or fascist appeaser can never afford! Power is for those who need it, not for those who possess too much of it already!
TAGERTY
Sir...
DOLLY
What do you say to that, Mephistopheles? Cat got your tongue?
(To TAGERTY:)
Look at him, slinking away.
TAGERTY
There’s nobody there.
DOLLY
Oh... Oh, there I go again...
TAGERTY
It’s alright, sir.
DOLLY
No, it’s not alright. It’s deeply embarrassing. My mind is going, young man. It’s the price I have paid.
(Pause.)
TAGERTY
The job, sir?
DOLLY
I thought you didn’t want it.
TAGERTY
I don’t. But life comes down, not to what one wants to do, but to what one must do. You show compassion in wanting to spare me the troubles you’ve had. But with all due respect, sir, I am young. I have the strength that has perhaps left you. I want to work for the emancipation and advancement of all mankind, as you have done. This firm and its infernal power, in the right hands, can still be put to use toward that end.
In the wrong hands...
DOLLY
Yes?
TAGERTY
In the wrong hands, say those of an unscrupulous, deceitful bastard whose only thoughts are of money and power and keeping it all in the hands which already hold it...
DOLLY
The firm would prosper, and survive into future generations and perhaps be of some use. You understand my dilemma, Mr. Tagerty. Pass the torch to one who, like yourself, shares my goals and ideals, with the risk that another generation of mismanagement would mean the end of the firm. Or find an an unscrupulous, deceitful bastard, leave things in his hands and call it a day. In that case, at least, I’d need not worry that either he or the firm would suffer.
TAGERTY
But then you’d be proving your father-in-law right.
(Pause. DOLLY looks around for Undershaft again.)
DOLLY
Would I?
(TAGERTY interposes himself between DOLLY and the unseen Undershaft.)
TAGERTY
Have some faith, Mr. Undershaft.
(DOLLY scrutinizes TAGERTY.)
DOLLY
You’d have to change your name, of course, as I have, to Andrew Undershaft.
TAGERTY
It would be an honor.
DOLLY
I’ve always found its phallic overtones rather overbearing, but surprisingly apt, given the developing field of rocket warfare.
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