The title of George Bernard Shaw's witty social satire Misalliance could refer to any of the various mismatches whose inharmonious nature is revealed through the action of the play: the discrepancy between rhetoric and the motivations it masks, the friction between parents and children, or the many romantic alliances which comprise the main plot.

Romance, in Misalliance, is less a consuming or ennobling passion than an excuse for conversation. In Shaw's theater, verbal sparring may be a more socially acceptable pleasure than sex, but it is hardly an innocent one, as its main appeal seems to be outdoing and occasionally humiliating another person. The characters' drive to manipulate each other through ideas reflects Edwardian bourgeois society's obsession with class and the power of appearances.

Marriage, of course, plays a large part in this scheme. The marriage plans of Hypatia (played by the elegant yet hyperactive Stephanie Roth), daughter of the rich underwear manufacturer Tarleton (Jeremy Geidt), become the main battleground on which she and her family struggle to define what marriage, freedom and a woman's role should be.

Hypatia is engaged to Bentley "Bunny" Summerhays (Derek Smith), an upper-class fop who describes himself as "all brains, and no more body than is absolutely necessary." Derek Smith's humorous characterization of Bunny as a peevish, bespectacled cream-puff bears out this description. But, as Hypatia confides to her mother (Bronia Stefan Wheeler), she doesn't love him, and can't see how anyone could; she simply can't find anyone better. Besides, she adds, marrying for love is too risky. Mrs. Tarleton comments that finding a likable husband was easier for her because she grew up poor and "there's so many more poor men in the world than rich ones, so I had more of a pick."

Filled with exasperation at the strictures of bourgeois life, and at the perpetual "talk, talk, talk" that replaces action, Hypatia envies the freedom of the poor and the wicked. Yet the audience (if not Hypatia) later learns that they are no more free than she is.

The other characters are similarly frustrated with the gaps between words and reality. When Julian Baker (Thomas Derrah), the socialist son of Tarleton's old mistress, arrives and tries to kill Tarleton, he first tries to justify the murder in true bourgeois fashion, saying he's avenging his mother's "ruin."

But when this sounds unconvincing, he switches to socialism. Baker's ideology, however, is only a mask for his real motive, frustration at the unfulfilling existence of a lower-middle-class office worker. Thomas Derrah skillfully portrays Baker as a sweaty-palmed nebbish in a cheap brown suit, using the borrowed finery of sophisticated Marxist rhetoric to disguise his feelings of inferiority.

As Hypatia would say, it's all just more "talk, talk, talk," replacing an honest correspondence between action and the social and ideological constructs used to describe it. The lower classes remain just as hampered by false consciousness as their social superiors.

Into this stuffy little domestic British world crashes a plane containing two aviators, Bunny's old college chum Joey Percival (Royal E. Miller) and a Polish acrobat named Lina Szczepanowska (played with panache by Candy Buckley). Hypatia seizes on Joey as her deus ex machina, and pursues him with all the zeal of a liberated woman.

But although she has released herself from the enervated Bunny, and established her right to express her own desires and take the initiative, her liberation is incomplete because Joey has more than a passing interest in her father's money. Has she merely sold herself rather than allowing someone else to sell her?

Lina is the only character who is truly free. Though all the men proposition her, she says she "would sooner be a clown and set bad examples of conduct for little children than take bread from the hand of a man." She rejects gowns and wears aviator's pants and boots--a loaded gesture in a play where one character refers to the social bond as corset that "supports the figure even though it does squeeze and deform it."

The play appears to regard bourgeois English society as flawed beyond repair. The only normal character is a woman who is outside conventional female roles, "respectable" class roles, and England itself. Liberation seems to lie in rejecting conventional categories of thought and learning to be true to one's self. Relationships will always be false so long as thought and conversation are used to maintain rigid power structures instead of provoking honest action.

Misalliance

rirected by David Wheeler

at the American Reperatory Theatre

Through August 2

The American Repertory Theatre's production of Misalliance is quite professional. The actors have been coached to speak with British accents which closely aopproximate the real thing. As Tarleton, Jeremy Geidt affects an accent slightly less refined than that of the aristocratic characters, a fine touch in such a class-conscious play.

Especially notable are the performances of Derek Smith as Bentley, the neurotic upper-class twit, and Stephanie Roth as the energetic yet graceful Hypatia. The stage, designed as a summerhouse with a marble fountain, captures that Edwardian spirit of gracious and confining domestic life, complete with a back wall made of a metal grille. For the Tarleton family, domestic life is truly a gilded cage.