In 1893 George Bernard Shaw wrote a play called “Mrs. Warren’s Profession.” Without further explanation, everyone can correctly guess that profession. None, however, remembers the profession of her daughter, Vivian. Vivian Warren was trained to be a mathematician and Shaw was clear that she possessed skills that equaled those of the male mathematicians of her, notably Karl Pearson. This show was an effort to get inside the world of Vivian Warren and to explore its limits.
This pay was our effort to do a backstage drama, the “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead” of George Bernard Shaw. The protagonist, Vivian Warren, is absent, thought she communications with her colleagues through a medium that is suspiciously like text messaging.
Her colleagues are women who work in a computing office, a service that calculates actuarial and financial tables for the insurance and banking industry. Set during the last smallpox epidemic (which coincided with the opening of “Mrs. Warren’s Profession”) deal with the issues of life and death in ways that are more than mere numbers. They life in a world of steam punk, Gilbert and Sillivan, railroad trains that make scheduled stops at cemeteries, and numbers that Geroge Bernard Shaw didn’t stop to understand.
Casting: