O.C. THEATER : 3 ‘Demon Women’ on G.B. Shaw : The stars of SCR’s ‘Heartbreak House’ talk about the play, the dramatist and about acting on the East and West coasts.

COSTA MESA —  In all the works of the immensely prolific George Bernard Shaw, it is impossible to find a word of wit or wisdom about Chinese takeout. Clearly, this is a flagrant omission, for Shaw had something to say on just about everything. So wide was his range that entire books, and even some careers, have been devoted to compiling his remarks.

If you’re in a hurry, you can find what he said on topics great or small in alphabetically indexed lists beginning, say, with advice (“never take anyone’s”) and ending with virtue (“like vice, it has its attractions”). Whatever you find, you’re bound to be entertained. Shaw was often pithy and almost always provocative.

His lack of guidance on Chinese takeout notwithstanding, South Coast Repertory ordered in some beef with broccoli and oyster sauce, kung pao chicken and chicken lo mein to lubricate a recent interview with the three starring actresses of Shaw’s “Heartbreak House,” which opens the season Friday and is now in previews on the SCR Mainstage.

The food came in little white cartons. The actresses came, bewigged but out of costume, during a pause in rehearsal: Frances Conroy, in a tank-top dress, sported a weird black hairdo resembling a bird’s nest; Devon Raymond, in a plaid blouse and jeans, wore a brown coiffure suggesting the mousy daughter of a parson; and Kandis Chappell, in a plain cardigan, in a soft bouffant aureole of ravishing auburn tresses.

All three play mesmerizing “demon women,” though of very different Shavian types, in “Heartbreak House.” The farce, staged by SCR artistic director Martin Benson, is about the aimless drift of a society that has abdicated the moral responsibility of making choices. It takes place on the eve of World War I.

The Georgia-born Conroy, who grew up near Boston, is regarded as one of New York City’s premier stage actors. In her SCR debut she plays the eccentric Hesione, elder daughter of the long-retired sea captain Shotover, who has built his landlocked Sussex mansion to look like a ship.

Chappell, a San Diego native, grew up in Southern California and has made a stellar theatrical reputation as one of its most versatile actors. In her last appearance at SCR, she won a 1988 Los Angeles Drama Critics Award for her role in “The Crucible.” This time Chappell portrays the snobbish Lady Utterword, Shotover’s younger daughter, who has returned after decades abroad and is dismayed to discover that her family hardly remembers her.

Raymond, who was born and reared in New York City, is an SCR discovery. She made her professional stage debut a few seasons ago in “Hard Times” on the SCR Second Stage, and she followed that up with roles in “A Christmas Carol” and “Holy Days.” She plays Ellie Dunn, the plucky daughter of a naive milquetoast (Hal Landon Jr.) who was forced into bankruptcy many years before by the cynical millionaire industrialist (Richard Doyle) to whom she is now engaged.

Shaw might not have approved of the Chinese takeout. He was, after all, a vegetarian. But he might have been intrigued and possibly a little pleased by the women’s remarks--even if the 40-minute interview at times sounded like a smorgasbord of opinion.

QUESTION: Why do you think Shaw calls the play “a fantasia in the Russian manner on English themes”?

CONROY: It’s his love letter to Chekov and “The Cherry Orchard.”

CHAPPELL: I see the Chekov connection. My mother asked me what this play was about, and I said, “It’s about a bunch of strange English people who get together.” And she said, “What happens?” And I said, “Come to think of it, nothing happens.”

CONROY: And they all sit around and talk about how nothing happens.

Q: Which is just like Chekov. But there’s always a lot of talk in any Shaw play, isn’t there?

RAYMOND: Shaw loved language and ideas. I think he said that two minds going at it is better than any sex you could ever have. He actually thought intellectual stimulation was better, and that shows in his writing. It’s mostly two people having this mind thing, which is really a lot of fun for an actor.

CONROY: He writes it like music too. He grew up around music, and so he writes these duos and trios. They’re beautifully orchestrated pieces, and very consciously so. He even sat in the back of the house for one of the productions of his plays and clocked an actor doing a monologue.

Q: If that was his way of checking the tempo, it sounds pretty intimidating.

(Special note: Conroy brought her own food in a plastic container--pasta with sun-dried tomatoes and feta cheese spiced with a little basil, sorrel leaves, red onion and olives--of which Shaw would doubtless have approved.)

Q: Is there anything special about playing Shavian women?

CONROY: They’re very full of life. They think. And they think so well. Their brains are very good.

CHAPPELL: Shaw writes women that the audience falls in love with. What’s great about Shaw is that each of his characters is so convincing. The audience gets sucked in because he gives everyone a reasonable argument.

Q: What is Lady Utterword all about?

CHAPPELL: Well, I haven’t found her yet. In the scheme of the play, she’s British imperialism. If I remind myself of that, I find out how to play her more and more. She seems a little flighty, but when it comes down to it, she knows just how to nail things.

Q: I think of her as a superior twit.

CHAPPELL: Oh, yeah. And that’s one of the problems I’m having. I think I’m trying to make her nice, and she just isn’t. I have to bring her around. Shaw says in the stage directions that she gives the appearance of comic silliness. It’s an erroneous impression.

Q: Does she get along with Hesione?

CONROY: I think so. Shaw grew up in a very small household in Ireland. They got around that by treating one another like furniture. The idea was to be impersonal, to be polite to one another because you’re just stuck together. His whole take was that families and familial obligations were exhausting. He felt that anyone who didn’t have a family, even an orphan, was one of the luckiest people.

Q: I get the feeling that Hesione is way ahead of her time.

CONROY: She’s a bohemian.

Q: What about Ellie Dunn?

RAYMOND: The way I see it, Ellie Dunn grows up in the space of two hours. She really gets an education. She’s like her father. She expects everyone to be honest, and she trusts everybody she meets. But she realizes that’s not the way to get through life, unfortunately.

Q: Let’s talk about getting work. All three of you have been to and from New York. What’s the difference between working here and working there?

CHAPPELL: I think the difference is that in New York you can be a “name” in the theater. In Los Angeles, you can’t be. To establish yourself as a stage actor in Southern California and to go to New York? It’s like: “Who are you? You do plays in California? Come on!”

Q: But everybody talks about how much West Coast theater has improved and how much New York theater has declined.

CONROY: It’s true. They’ve drained the New York theater talent to Los Angeles. People have come because it’s extremely difficult to live there and work in the theater. What’s happening there now is that Tony Randall has started up a national company. Lincoln Center pays a living wage. The Public Theatre . . . they hire actors. But a lot of people have come out here.

Q: But do they do theater once they get here?

CONROY: They’re happy to discover they can be in a wonderful production. But they come out to land something in television or film because they have a much greater chance of that here than in New York.

RAYMOND: The thing that happens in New York is you end up not doing what you want to do. And you start to question why you’re living like that.

CONROY: This is my fourth trip here since last February. In that time I ran into six people I was just in plays with in New York. In almost every case, they’d given up their apartments there and moved here.

Q: Are any of you pursuing movie work?

RAYMOND: I just did “Singles,” a Warner Bros. film with an original script by Cameron Crowe. That’s coming out soon, I hope.

CHAPPELL: When I did (the Neil Simon play) “Rumors” in Los Angeles, I thought people in the business would come and see it. The people who did you could count on one hand. But that’s how I got the movie “Another You” that Gene Wilder did. It opened and closed. Wait till it comes out on video. (She checks her watch.) Any minute now.

CONROY: Right now I’m doing nothing but breathing and trying to do this play.

* “Heartbreak House” is on the Mainstage through Oct. 6 at South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Show times: Tuesdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m.; Sundays at 7:30 p.m. Matinees Saturdays and Sundays at 2:30 p.m. Tickets: $23 to $32 (beginning Friday); $15 to $22 (for previews through Thursday). Information: (714) 957-4033.