Center Rep Satire Treads The Comedic Fringe

She’s silly, smart, outrageous and extreme. So is he.

And when you go to Center REP’s Arms and the Man, now playing at Walnut Creek’s Lesher Center and running through Feb. 25, you will know the description suits the playwright, the director and the production.

George Bernard Shaw is known for his wickedly witty social commentary, delivered with humor and a certain indulgence for satire that borders on ferocity in some works and trips lightly along the comedic fringe in others.

Director Nancy Carlin, who offered the adjectives above to define her own sense of humor, says in an interview that this play falls in the latter category.

“The situation is more like a farce and is different in that way,” Carlin says, before calling attention to Shaw’s sharp language and “goofy setup.”

Onstage, it’s goofy indeed as Captain Bluntschli (Craig Marker), a Swiss soldier in the Serbian Army, barrels into Raina Petkoff’s (Maggie Mason) satin sheen-covered bedroom. He’s on the run from the Bulgarians, who happen to be led by Raina’s fiancé, Sergius (Gabriel Marin), and her father. After first waving a pistol at his unwilling protector, Bluntschli admits he carries nothing more dangerous than chocolates, which he has consumed to stave off his tremendous fatigue and fear of battle.

Eventually, the intruder is smuggled out of the house and the victorious, pompous Bulgarian’s return. From there, it all becomes a chocolate cream dream, when the dashing Bluntschli returns to pay his respects. Soon enough, Sergius tramples class boundaries by falling in love with the maid, and Raina realizes her intruder is the only man who respects her. The posing, betrayal and lies melt away, revealing the characters’ sweet, but empty, posturing.

Behind it all, is Shaw’s smart political humor and the bold, not-afraid-to-go-to-the-edge direction of Carlin.

“These characters are caught in their own movie,” she insists. “To see that, you have to go all the way. It’s not over-acting. It’s going to where their characters are written—it’s filling the text to where it wants to be.”

Carlin says she came to the work as “a Berkeley flower child who grew up in the sixties,” and sees current parallels to “the hideous reality of nationalistic propaganda” that leads to conflict.

“We continually have leaders pumping up people with notions of stomping off with the latest tool on the way to war,” she complains.

It was no surprise that history repeats itself, but Carlin says there were still discoveries in the process of bringing the production to the stage.

“There were tons of new insights, every day,” she begins. “We assumed the two leading men were just so, but suddenly, we saw the buffoon character has Shaw’s smartest political commentary and the good worker soldier has romanticism.”

Raina’s character gained dimension for Carlin due to the work of the actor who plays the role.

“Mason is very fresh—in a way contemporary, without taking the play out of time. There’s no remove: she’s alive and really knows how to handle the joke within the text.”

Like a military operation, Arms and the Man achieves its purpose through the balance of special forces on the ground.

On opening night, Kendra Lee Oberhauser as the maid, Louka, stands out. She is genuine; capturing a complex, contradictory character within her first entrance and carrying that depth to the final curtain.

Michael Ray Wisely plays Major Petkoff with boundless joy and sports the best profile with pumped-up hair and splendid costumes designed by Victoria Livingston-Hall.

Mason softens the edge between her character’s posing and underlying strength, a distinction which might gain more bite from sharper contrast. Still, she strikes a perfect balance between Marker’s super straight man portrayal and Marin’s campy lunging and delicious delivery of Shaw’s most ridiculous clever lines.

Arms and the Man runs at the Lesher Center now through February 25.  For ticket information, visit www.centerrep.og or call (925)943-7469.