Notes from Chuck Berst

Bernard Shaw scholars tend to be a generous lot. When I first went to the Comparative Drama Conference, folks from the International Shaw Society made me feel quite at home, and they have continued to be welcoming as I've met up with them at subsequent conferences.

When the Shaw scholar Chuck Berst passed away in 2019, it was a great loss. His wife Roelina, however, has tried to pass on his large collection of books about Shaw, and generously offered to send me the Constable & Co. collection of the great dramatist's works. One thousand and twenty-five copies of the 32-volume set were printed in 1931, and they are a treasure.

In the past, I have always checked out individual volumes of the Constable & Co. set from the library when I needed them. Unfortunately, libraries have been declared "non-essential" for more than a year now, so I was excited to receive the books. Even better, Roelina left in place the bookmarks where Chuck noted passages of particular interest. I've been going through them, trying to glean what I could from his insights.

One volume of Shaw's writing, Pen Portraits and Reviews, had quite a few passages flagged. The first one was a book review called "The Old Revolutionist and the New Revolution" which Shaw published in The Nation in 1921. Though actually about a book by H.M. Hyndman, the article is more interesting for what it says about the novelist H.G. Wells, a long-time associate of Shaw who had joined him in championing Socialism.

Another book mark, labelled "Terry" in an underlined fashion, marks an interesting comment on the actress Ellen Terry, who "has always been adored by painters." That is certainly true, and John Singer Sargent's 1889 portrait of her as Lady Macbeth has frequently been reproduced in prints and postcards (of few of which I might own). Shaw admits that he wanted Terry to perform his own plays and implies that he wrote Captain Brassbound's Conversion for her. Chuck marked in the margins where Shaw acknowledged that the description of the heroine of The Man of Destiny was "simply a description of Ellen Terry."

Shaw's contribution to a memoir on the journalist H.W. Massingham was also marked, but I was more interested in a flagged article called "Shaming the Devil about Shelley." The first article I published on Shaw had to do with the influence Percy Shelley's play The Cenci had on Shaw's early work. Shelley had anticipated Shaw's vision of the "life force" he worshipped, or at least Shaw thought so when he wrote "there never was a man with so abiding and full a consciousness of the omnipresence of a living force, manifesting itself here in the germination and growth of a tree, there in the organization of a poet's brain."

The final bookmark in the volume is for a published letter Shaw wrote about fellow Irish dramatist Oscar Wilde. Each slip of paper was illuminating for me, and I look forward to exploring some of the other marked passages in the set.

Back to Methuselah

I have a long-standing interest in George Bernard Shaw's five-play cycle Back to Methuselah. Four years ago I gave a paper on it at the Comparative Drama Conference in Baltimore, and I also spoke about it this January at the annual conference of the Modern Language Association.

That's why I knew I had to go when Gingold Theatrical Group announced they would be doing a staged reading of the whole epic over two different nights. Tonight they presented radically cut versions of the first three plays: In the Beginning, The Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas, and The Thing Happens.

I would have liked to have seen a full evening of the first play, which begins in the Garden of Eden. Tony Roach was an excellent Adam, though, and I thoroughly enjoyed Talene Monahon as Eve. (Monahon was also wonderful as Blanche in GTG's production of Shaw's Widowers' Houses a few years ago.) The real revelation, however, was Brenda Braxton as the scene-stealing Serpent.

Shaw wrote part two of the cycle to take place in his own present day, and it pairs very nicely with the third part, which takes place in the year 2170. Actors in the previous play are meant to appear again in his vision of the future. While Shaw makes this clear in the text, seeing it onstage really drives home the point. After the end of the third part, director David Staller was kind enough to invite me up on stage for a talkback with the audience, something he threatened to do again if I return next month for parts four and five: The Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman and As Far as Thought Can Reach.

Well, I'll definitely be back, and if you missed the first part, don't worry! You can still enjoy the second half of the cycle on its own, and you'll get to see Shaw at his most audacious. The reading will be held at 7:00 on Monday, November 19th at Symphony Space. Get your tickets now!

MLA Has Begun!

Yesterday, I began attending my first conference of the Modern Language Association, which is meeting in New York City this year.

I'll actually be presenting two papers. On Saturday morning (at 8:30 am) I'll be a part of the "Dickens and Resistance" session arranged by the Dickens Society. Diana Archibald put together the session, which also includes talks by Sophie Christman-Lavin, Jolene Zigarovich, and Jonathan Farina.

My paper is called "A Blot in the Theater: Dickens, Macready, and the Quest to 'Revive the Drama'." It deals with how Charles Dickens championed Robert Browning's play A Blot in the 'Scutcheon even as his friend, William Charles Macready was ensuring the play's demise.

Macready got along much better with playwrights if they were dead. He famously revived William Shakespeare's King John with lush period costumes and scenery painted by William Telbin (who based his work on existing medieval buildings). Macready also turned Lord Byron's play Werner into a star vehicle for himself. You can see here a painting of Macready as Werner. (It currently hangs in the Victoria and Albert Museum.)

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending another Dickens panel called "Ephemeral Dickens" that was put together by Susan Zieger. Elizabeth Frengel and Janice Carlisle gave a talk called "Disposable Dickens" on researching Dickens ephemera in the archive. One interesting item they brought up was a call slip from the British Library on which a young Dickens had requested the book Greenwich Hospital. That book is a collection of short comic sketches illustrated by George Cruikshank, who went on to illustrate a book of short sketches by Dickens, Sketches by Boz.

Lillian Nayder, who I had heard speak before at a meeting of The Friends of Dickens New York, gave a talk called "Dickensian Jottings" about how Dickens's celebrity has frequently moved his marginal notes to center stage, and allowed his postscripts to replace scripts. I was particularly intrigued by the last talk of the session, in which Rebecca Mitchell spoke on the famous "Dolly Varden" dress inspired by the character in Barnaby Rudge. The style was based on the polonaise dresses popular in the 18th century, but it received a revival in the nineteenth century after it was worn by the actress Augusta Thomson as Dolly Varden in an 1866 stage adaptation of Barnaby Rudge.

The Dolly Varden dress caused quite a craze in the 1870s. Many songs were composed about it, and you can see the cover of some sheet music for one at left. The Franco-Prussian War might have had some affect on the craze, since the latest fashions from Paris where temporarily unavailable. When Dickens died in 1870, though, one of the items in his estate was a painting of Dolly Varden William Powell Frith had done in the 1840s. After that sale, the style became all the rage.

If you're still around on Sunday at noon, one of the last sessions of the MLA conference will be "Revolutionary States: George Bernard Shaw, 1918." Jennifer Buckley is presiding, and I'll be giving a second paper called "Staging Immortality in 1918: Bernard Shaw and Luigi Antonelli." The paper takes a comparative approach to dramatic responses to the end of World War I and the emergence of state communism, examining Shaw's Back to Methuselah and the Italian playwright Luigi Antonelli's A Man Confronts Himself.

I gave a similar talk at the Comparative Drama Conference in Baltimore in 2014, but did some new research that has changed the focus of my comparison. I will be joined by Virginia Costello talking about Shaw and Emma Goldman, Martin Meisel talking about Shaw and Sean O'Casey, and Ellen Dolgin talking about Shaw and J.M. Barrie. Hope to see you there!

Back from Baltimore

I had a great time at this year's Comparative Drama Conference in Baltimore. This was my first year attending, and I was honored to be a part of a session sponsored by the International Shaw Society.

Thursday morning, Beck Holden from Tufts spoke about Charles Kean's 1858 production of The Merchant of Venice, and David Muller gave a fascinating talk about the effects of weather on theatre attendance at the Comedie Francaise. In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, Louis Morin took meticulous weather observations in Paris, and Muller compared Morin's weather reports with the ticket receipts at the theatre. Contrary to Muller's expectations, when it got colder outside, theatre attendance actually increased, though it did go down a bit when things got very, very cold. Excessively high temperatures also somewhat lowered theatre attendance, but Muller said he was surprised by how hardy audiences at the time were.

In another session later that morning, Shehzad Ghias of Brooklyn College spoke about women on stage in Pakistan. Some theatre historians claim women did not act in that country until Mary Fenton started appearing in Parsi dramas in the late 19th century. However, Ghias argues this includes only a very narrow vision of theatre. Women always acted in folk dramas, he said, though in those cases, the genders were segregated, with women performing for other women and men performing for other men. During Sufi festivals, women also danced publicly, even in the company of men, but these were religious celebrations, and not eroticized. Of course, erotic dance has also been around in Pakistan since time immemorial, including today in the so-called "Diamond Market," the red-light district of Lahore.

During the same session, Ariel McClanahan Watson of Saint Mary's University spoke about the Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour's provocative piece White Rabbit Red Rabbit. Though Soleimanpour in unable to travel outside of Iran, his plays can, and the piece has been performed all over the world. Elif Bas also came to the session from Bahcesehir University in Istanbul to speak about the state of theatre censorship in Turkey.

That afternoon, Rick DesRochers of Long Island University chaired a session on exceeding boundaries and resisting traditions in U.S. theatre. He spoke about the school plays of the Marx Brothers, many of which had routines that made it into the movie Horsefeathers. Kathryn LeTrent talked about another play that transitioned to being a film, Clare Boothe Luce's The Women. Sound designer Yu-Yun Hsieh also gave a paper on the use of silence in Annie Baker's Circle Mirror Transformation and Suzan Lori-Parks' Topdog/Underdog.

After chatting with Rick for a while, I snuck into the Faust session, where Goethe scholars Downing Cless, Jan Hagens, and Birte Giesler had a very stimulating conversation. Jan made the interesting point that Goethe includes the Prelude in the Theatre with the dramatic poet before he shows the Prologue in Heaven. The effect, he said, was to show that even God is subordinate to the creative mind of the Poet. Now that's truly Romanticism with a capital R!

My own session was not until the late afternoon. I gave my paper on Back to Methuselah and Jesse Hellman gave a fascinating comparison between Lady Hamilton and Eliza Doolittle from Pygmalion. Both, of course, were born in the gutter, then trained and coached to fit in with the highest levels of society. Shaw wrote the part of Eliza for Pat Campbell. Prior to that, we were all interested to learn, Campbell appeared onstage as Lady Hamilton in a play called Nelson's Enchantress. The script for that play mysteriously disappeared, but some of Jesse's friends recently tracked down a misfiled copy at the British Library. I would love to read it!

There were a number of Shavians at the conference, and Jesse and I fielded some great questions from Tony Stafford of the University of Texas at El Paso, Christopher Innes of York University, and Mary Christian of Indiana University. That evening, I got to have dinner with them all, and then we headed over to Center Stage for Gavin Witt's production of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. It was delightful.

Unfortunately, I had to head back to New York the next morning for a rehearsal of Moby-Dick. IATI Theater will be doing a staged reading of my adaptation on Tuesday with Montgomery Sutton, Gordon Stanley, Richard Dezmond, and Doug Rossi. Dev Bondarin is directing. Come out to see it if you can!

CDC Preview

I'm very excited about going to Stevenson University's Comparative Drama Conference next month in Baltimore. Unfortunately, I will be missing much of the conference (including keynote speaker David Henry Hwang) as I will have to come back to New York for a rehearsal of Moby-Dick, which is having a staged reading by IATI Theater.

Still, I should be able to catch some great speakers. Beck Holden is giving a talk on Charles Kean's production of The Merchant of Venice. Shehzad Ghias will be speaking about the portrayal of women in Pakistani Theatre. Later that afternoon, Rick DesRochers will be presenting on the Marx Brothers.

Of course I'll have to also attend the session on "Goethe's Faust and his Descendants." Jan Hagens, Charles Gershman, and Birte Giesler will all be presenting.

I'll be presenting my own paper on Back to Methuselah as part of a Shaw panel. Jesse Hellman will also be there, speaking about connections between the infamous Lady Hamilton and Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion. That will be at 4:00 on Thursday, April 3rd. If you're coming to the conference, perhaps I'll see you there!

Stevenson Comparative Drama Conference

My paper on visions of immortality in the works of George Bernard Shaw and Luigi Antonelli has been accepted for the 38th Comparative Drama Conference at Stevenson University in Baltimore. I'm very excited about getting to go, and about the conference's keynote speaker, David Henry Hwang.

The paper looks at parallels between Shaw's five-play cycle Back to Mathuselah and Antonelli's classic from the Theatre of the Grotesque, A Man Confronts Himself. The conference will be in April, but I'm not sure yet on which day I'll be presenting.

More information later!