"But how can you love a liar?"/"I don't know. But you can, fortunately. Otherwise there wouldn't be much love in the world."

Those are lines spoken in the play "Heartbreak House," by George Bernard Shaw, which we saw at The American Players Theater yesterday.



The 1920 play is set just before World War I. The line "But how can you love a liar?" is spoken by the rich bohemian woman Mrs. Hushabye, and the line that follows it is spoken by Ellie, a poor young woman who is in love with Mrs. Hushabye's lying husband, Hector. Ellie intends to marry a rich capitalist, Boss Mangan.

Mangan, trying to extricate himself from the planned marriage, reveals what a liar and a cheater he is, but Ellie still wants to marry him. She says:  "If we women were particular about men's characters, we should never get married at all, Mr Mangan."

Hector explains his behavior:

HECTOR. What am I to do? I can't fall in love; and I can't hurt a woman's feelings by telling her so when she falls in love with me. And as women are always falling in love with my moustache I get landed in all sorts of tedious and terrifying flirtations in which I'm not a bit in earnest....

Mangan reaches a breaking point and declares he's getting the hell out of the house, "Heartbreak House," where all the action takes place. Hector makes a move to go too and to turn it into a ridiculous romantic escapade:

HECTOR: Let us all go out into the night and leave everything behind us.

MANGAN. You stay where you are, the lot of you. I want no company, especially female company.

ELLIE. Let him go. He is unhappy here. He is angry with us.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Go, Boss Mangan; and when you have found the land where there is happiness and where there are no women, send me its latitude and longitude; and I will join you there.

I thought you might enjoy those lines. There's much more, of course. Shaw was writing a play deliberately in the manner of Anton Chekhov. Note the seagull on the set in my photograph (at the middle of the right edge).

Chekhov famously said "If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there" (and "The Seagull" is the Chekhov play with the last-act gunshot). So when Captain Shotover brought out a box of dynamite to tinker with in Act One, I figured Shaw meant us to see the Chekhov joke and to expect an explosion in the next act. We're expected to anticipate the whole lot of them blowing up and to contemplate, throughout, whether that isn't what they all deserve.

AFTERTHOUGHT: What is the difference between "escape" and "escapade"?

"Escape" + "ade" suggests a drink that produces escape.

Yes, I know that's not right! Do you expect me to look it up in a dictionary?

Speaking of drink, Captain Shotover (a very old man) speaks often of "the seventh degree of concentration," which seems to be some mystical state that he learned about in his seafaring journeys, some 1920s New Age-iness. Late in the play, Ellie declares:

ELLIE. There seems to be nothing real in the world except my father and Shakespeare. [Hector]'s tigers are false; Mr Mangan's millions are false; there is nothing really strong and true about [Mrs. Hushabye] but her beautiful black hair; and Lady Utterword's is too pretty to be real. The one thing that was left to me was the Captain's seventh degree of concentration; and that turns out to be—

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Rum.

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Ambiguity of the day (from GQ): "If your friend says she wants to cut off every dick in a five mile radius, let her!"

The article, by Marian Bull, is "How to Talk to the Women in Your Life Right Now," and by "right now," she means:



There's quite possibly a lot of good advice there. But what made me select this — out of everything — to blog was the absurd, grisly second meaning of "If your friend says she wants to cut off every dick in a five mile radius, let her!"

ADDED: I'm reminded of a poster I saw in Amsterdam back in 1993. I made a drawing — previously, blogged here — in my "Amsterdam Notebooks":

"PUBLIC CASTRATION IS A GOOD IDEA/VICTIMS OF RAPE DEMAND JUSTICE."

What called that to mind was my discussion with Meade as he was writing this comment:

"If your friend says she wants to cut off every dick in a five mile radius, let her!"

And then tell her: Only five miles? "No artificial limits as to time or [distance] should be imposed on this [mass amputation]."

And then run, old man. Run like hell.

I had suggested that Meade could avoid attracting language/anatomy pedants by using the word "amputation" instead of "castration."

I'm also reminded of the Ernest Hemingway story, "God Rest You Merry Gentlemen" (1925). Summary:

Two physicians sit in the Emergency Room of a Kansas City hospital on Christmas Day.... The doctors are telling the narrator of their most interesting encounter of this holiday season: a distraught adolescent, in a religious frenzy, had come in requesting castration for his "awful lust." The two docs managed to blunder the encounter so sufficiently that the boy left, only to return a few hours later bleeding dangerously from his penile self-amputation. The self-centered conversation returns to verbal ego-play between the two physicians, without a hint that either has considered the magnitude of the medical malfeasance against the boy.

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"If someone had told me, if anyone had told me, there is a specific law that says this is a crime."

"I did not know. I’ve said this over and over again. Had I’d known, if anyone knows my personality. Just the idea, this would count as a crime."

Said Mary Kay Letourneau, who had an affair with a 12-year-old boy whom she met when he was 8 and she was a schoolteacher.

As for the boy, Vili Fualaau, who is now 36, he says that for him it all got started when he was "showing off to a cousin of mine, betting because we used to brag about girls when we were young." He made a bet with his cousin that he could "get" Letourneau, and he pursued her, they "became really close and then I forgot about the bet."

“‘But we were in love. It’s love. I didn’t make him do anything. If anything, he was wanting it. He was pushing for it. We were in love. How can it be a crime?,’” he claims she said. “I had to repeat many times in many different ways why it’s a crime.”

The children of Letourneau and Fualaau — Audrey and Georgia — are now grown up, 21 and 19. Audrey says "It doesn’t feel any different" to have a life with such a notorious beginning. "It’s not really brought to our attention. We grew up with it so we’re adapted to it, I guess." It's the only life you could possibly have, and you're alive. What can you say about that?

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