by AMY BARRATT

The other night I found myself watching an episode of My Wife and Kids with Damon Wayans. The plot revolved around the decision of his character's wife-currently a sexy stay-at-home mom-to go back to school. Hubby was against the idea mainly because she would have less time to make him peach cobbler. What I would have thought would be the main concern-where they would find the money to pay full-time fees to an American university-was never even raised. This is why I can't take television seriously.

Money, or the lack of it, used to be a major theme in literature, but in recent times it has fallen out of favour. Contemporary romantic comedies in particular are inhabited solely by people who don't have to worry about money. But go back a hundred years or so and you'll find "income" and its companion, "marrying well" as the principal themes of romantic comedy.

It comes up in the first pages of G.B. Shaw's Major Barbara (1905) when Lady Britomart speaks to her son Stephen about the financial future of his two sisters:

STEPHEN: But the girls are all right. They are engaged.

LADY BRITOMART: [complacently] Yes. I have made a very good match for Sarah. Charles Lomax will be a millionaire at 35. But that is ten years ahead; and in the meantime his trustees cannot under the terms of his father's will allow him more than 800 pounds a year.

Lady Britomart goes on to explain that they must ask her estranged husband, Andrew Undershaft, for money to support the girls. Stephen is scandalized because Undershaft's fortune comes from the arms trade. Much of the conflict in the play will arise from the fact that daughter Barbara has chosen a life of poverty trying to save souls with the Salvation Army, while Papa, back in the picture by invitation of Mama, believes there are just two things necessary to salvation: money and gunpowder.

Major Barbara, opening tonight, Oct. 16, at the Saidye under the direction of Guy Sprung, is in many ways a very contemporary play. Money still makes the world go round, even if it has become unseemly to talk about it. Shaw's preoccupations of religion and class distinction are also as much at play in this new millennium as they were at the turn of the last century.

Or dial back the clock to the beginning of the 19th century and you get this: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."

This is of course the opening of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, in which Mr. Bennett does nothing at all to secure his daughters' futures, while Mrs. Bennett makes herself ridiculous chasing after rich potential suitors.

A stage adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, perhaps Austen's best-loved novel, is being performed starting next week at John Abbott College. The play by Christina Calvit was well received when it was staged at Stratford a few years back. The Theatre Workshop's first production of the season, it is directed by Murray Napier and Jason Howell.

Major Barbara, to Nov. 2 at the Saidye. $16-$38, 739-7944 Pride and Prejudice, Oct. 23-25 and Oct. 28-Nov. 1 AT 8PM, with Friday matinees at 1:30PM, at the Casgrain Theatre of John Abbott College, $8-$12, 457-2447

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