“What a woman wants has nothing to do with marriage.”

That, in a nutshell, is the theme of George Bernard Shaw’s insightful, funny play about nuptials, and all the complications and challenges they bring. Past what women want, Getting Married, on now through November 16th at the Shaw Festival, revolves around what people (male and female) want, expect, and need in relationships. In a smart, visually beautiful production by Soulpepper co-founder Joseph Ziegler, the ins and outs of how we relate, and why we choose to relate (or not), are examined with huge doses of sparkling wit and insightful characterizations.

In light of recent economic events, the concepts of finance and transaction couldn’t be more ripe for examination. With the banking world in turmoil, ideas around profit, worth, and work come into stark relief. Certainly, the timeliness –and timelessness –of such ideas makes Shaw’s 1893 play more relevant than ever; what could be more contemporary than the acquisition and loss of wealth, at any and all costs? Mrs. Warren’s Profession is a play about money, career, freedom, choice, women, and the give-and-take commerce that characterizes the modern world; italso gives the term ‘profit/loss statement’ a whole new meaning. Both epic and intimate, Shaw Festival Artistic Director Jackie Maxwell’s knowing production nicely balances the personal with the professional, providing illuminating glimpses into the lives and passions of two very different, terribly similar women, whose iron will to succeed at any cost takes them on separate, and ultimately isolating, journeys.

Anne-Marie Macdonald is, perhaps, the ideal Canadian artist. She’s an author, actor, broadcaster, and playwright. She is successful in a number of different arts disciplines, and is the winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize, a Governor-General’s Award, and the Chalmers Canadian Play Award. Her play, Anything That Moves, produced by Toronto’s Tarragon and Nightwood Theatres, won a Dora Mavor Moore Award in 2000. Come October 25th, she’ll be appearing in a re-mount of the wildly successful production of Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls with Soulpepper Theatre Company. Her performance in Churchill’s work will be mere weeks after her 2005 work, Belle Moral, closes at the Shaw Festival. Though wildly different, Churchill and MacDonald’s work invite certain comparisons for the way each deals with the position of women, and the choices they face in shaping their own lives.

As any comedy fan will tell you, there’s as many different styles of humour as there are comics. There’s political humour, biting in its observation, truthful in its nature. There’s so-called “ethnic” humour that laughs at cultural difference even as it explores human similarities. There’s also silly humour, the sort that doesn’t have any relation to the day-to-day grind but is pure escapism, a trip back to childhood, when nonsense made perfect sense. Britain’s Monty Python troupe could easily be classified as the latter. With its embrace of the silly, the surreal, and the just plain bizarre, the Python troupe –Eric Idle, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Michael Palin, Graham Chapman, and Terry Jones –built up a dedicated fanbase through the late 1960s, into the 70s and through the 80s that included a television series (Monty Python’s Flying Circus) and a number of films, including Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, And Now For Something Completely Different, and Monty Python’s Life Of Brian.