Shaw in New York... in Print!

The most recent issue of The Shaw Society's publication The Shavian arrived in the mail yesterday. I was pleased to see them include my article "Bumper Year for Shaw in New York."

I knew I wanted to write something for The Shavian after I saw Bedlam's wonderful production of Pygmalion last spring. Director Eric Tucker did a wonderful job making the century-old play fiercely relevant to contemporary America.

Of course, Bedlam wasn't the only company doing Shaw in New York last year. Saint Joan returned to Broadway in a production by the Manhattan Theatre Club. Being a huge fan of Joan of Arc (and having written my own play about the Maid, Dark Night of the Soul), I knew I would be seeing that as well.

Plus, Gingold Theatrical Group always does a great job with their Project Shaw readings, and I knew they were planning a full-scale production of Heartbreak House. I pitched the idea of an article on all three to The Shavian's editor, Anne Wright. She liked the idea. The only problem was that Heartbreak House wouldn't be opening for several months. Still, she asked me to go ahead an write the article, getting in my copy as quickly as possible after Heartbreak House opened so the whole issue could be laid out, printed, and mailed by the end of the year.

Well, GTG outdid themselves, and I ended up having nothing but good things to say about their production, in spite of not knowing how good it would be when I agreed to review it. Director David Staller reset Heartbreak House as a play-within-a-play happening during the blitz in London, and the concept worked beautifully.

Incidentally, this issue of The Shavian also includes articles by Philippa Parker, Stanley Weintraub, Kenneth McConkey, and others, so I'm in good company!

Bedlam's PYGMALION

I just got back from seeing the Bedlam theatre company's wonderful production of Pygmalion at the Sheen Center. Get your tickets soon, as it is not to be missed.

Bedlam has a knack for doing the plays of Shaw. Their production of Saint Joan was one of the best things I saw in 2013. Once again, director and Bedlam co-founder Eric Tucker has made Shaw feel contemporary and relevant to today's audiences.

The production uses an immersive technique for the first act, having the actors mingle with the audience in a space constructed to look like a London street. Tucker himself is there, playing Henry Higgins with unabashed ego and self-satisfaction. Vaishnavi Sharma plays Eliza with a strong Indian accent, requiring a few line changes, but the concept works.

After the first act, the audience is ushered into a specially constructed seating area in the Sheen Center's black box space. The rest of the play is performed in three-quarters round, with the cast of six performing multiple roles, in true Bedlam style. Actors change their accents quickly from one character to another while doffing new hats or wearing shawls to indicate a new character.

This technique has worked in a number of Bedlam shows, including Hamlet and Sense and Sensibility, but it is especially apropos here, in a play about the importance of speech. Also, watching Eliza's Indian accent disappear as she is assimilated more and more into "respectable" society adds a new element to this story of a flower girl taught to speak like a duchess.

In addition to Tucker and Sharma, the play also features Bedlam veteran Edmund Lewis, who was a memorable Laertes, but now makes an even stronger impression as Mrs. Higgins! Nigel Gore, who was a brilliant Dr. Rank in Theatre for a New Audience's A Doll's House, plays a perfect Pickering, as well as assorted other characters. Rajesh Bose is hysterical as Mr. Doolittle, and Annabel Capper does a great job going back and forth between Mrs. Higgins's maid and Clara Eynsford-Hill.

Pygmalion is only playing until April 22nd, so make sure you don't miss out. As Eliza might say, it would be a bloody shame!

Bedlam's Sense and Sensibility

The Bedlam theatre company has attracted great attention ever since its innovative staging of George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan. That production, starring Bedlam co-founder Andrus Nichols as Joan of Arc, not only drew critical praise, but it was the talk of the Shaw in New York conference last year.

Bedlam's method--small casts performing multiple roles, flexible theatre spaces, innovative staging--also worked with their production of Hamlet. But now the company is tackling an adaptation of Jane Austen's beloved novel Sense and Sensibility. Can the same method that worked so well for Shakespeare and Shaw also serve a sprawling novel like Sense and Sensibility?

Well, let's see... yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, and well, um... yes.

Kate Hamill, who also plays Marianne Dashwood, penned the adaptation, and she is to be commended for keeping the piece engaging and surprising, even for those already familiar with the story. Eric Tucker, who also directed Saint Joan and Hamlet, adds magnificent staging to Hamill's script, having actors literally roll across the stage on wheeled chairs, sofas, tables, and other set pieces, all designed by John McDermott. The result is a joyous, rollicking, fast-paced ride through the novel.

I will not say that the production never stops, because it does, but the moments when the frenetic action comes to a standstill have all the more intensity because of the contrast. When Elinor Dashwood (played by Nichols) comes face to face with a secret from Lucy Steele (played with delightful annoyingness by Laura Baranik), the sudden standstill in the action feels to us like the end of the world--as no doubt it does to poor Elinor as well.

The entire cast is excellent, but the story of course focuses on the Dashwood ladies, not just Elinor and Marianne, but also their sister Margaret (played by Jessica Frey) and their mother (played by Samantha Steinmetz, who also does a hilarious turn as Lucy Steele's ditzy sister Anne). Edmund Lewis is upstanding as Colonel Brandon, and Jason O'Connell is a charismatic Edward Ferrars when he isn't stealing the scene from himself by doubling as Edward's ridiculous younger brother Robert.

Though the production hints at the Regency period with flowing dresses and occasional snippets of music from English country dances, Bedlam makes sure not to lock the story down in any one era, throwing in occasional modern touches, such as pop music that segues into something approaching a nineteenth-century country dance at the beginning of the show. Fans of "Jane Punk" should be delighted to see the mix of periods and styles that still manages to be faithful to the spirit of Austen's novel.

If you want to see the show (and you should), it's playing in Greenwich Village at the Gym at Judson until March 6th. Tickets are liable to go quickly, so see it now! For more information go to:

BEDLAM

Shaw in New York Conference Begins

The International Shaw Society's "Shaw in New York" conference is off and running!

Last night, David Staller, artistic director of The Gingold Theatrical Group, kicked off the conference with a keynote address about his work with Project Shaw. For nine years now, GTG has been giving concert readings of the plays of George Bernard Shaw and his contemporaries. This Monday, they will be presenting The Doctor's Dilemma at Symphony Space. I'm looking forward to it!

After the keynote, Terry Teachout, drama critic for The Wall Street Journal, gave a wonderful reflection on the state of Shaw productions today. Teachout praised Theatre Bedlam's landmark production of Saint Joan, which I had the good fortune of seeing in 2013. Director Eric Tucker got four talented actors (including himself) to perform all of the parts. The production was in modern dress with an innovative set and the audience's configuration changing periodically. Teachout said the production should change the way we do Shaw.

He compared the way we see Shakespeare produced with the way we normally see Shaw's plays. Shakespeare can be set in any period, but Shaw is almost always set in vaguely Edwardian times. With Shakespeare, we expect avant-garde techniques, whereas Shaw is always done with simple, straight-forward Realism. Shakespeare's plays can be trimmed back, but Shaw's are almost always performed uncut from their published versions, even though those texts were rarely performed in their entirety during Shaw's time. We expect double-casting with Shakespeare, but require large, expensive casts for Shaw. That means while producing Shakespeare can be affordable, the economics make Shaw's plays a rare event for most theaters.

The solution, Teachout said, is to start treating Shaw's plays like Shakespeare's. Granted, directors' concepts don't always work for Hamlet, so they won't always work for Saint Joan, either. The point is we need to allow ourselves to try things. If Shakespeare's texts are not sacred, why should Shaw's be? Most of his important plays are in the public domain anyway, so there is no need to get permission from an estate. Let's start seeing Shaw liberated from a single way of producing his work, and maybe he will become as much our contemporary as Shakespeare seems to be.

Today, the conference continued, with legendary Shaw scholar Stanley Weintraub introducing some of Shaw's playlets that occur outside the plays, in various essays, articles, and prefaces. Four professional actors read scenes from these playlets at the Bruno Walter Auditorium of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. My favorite was a scene between Jesus and Pontius Pilate penned in 1933 for the preface to On the Rocks. Weintraub said this scene could be read as a continuation of Shaw's early Passion Play, a blank verse drama he began in 1878 but never finished.

Later that morning, Anne and Martin Wright gave a presentation of a new interactive on-line tour of Shaw's Corner, the author's home in Ayot St. Lawrence. I was fascinated by seeing in the house a design by Aubrey Beardsley that I immediately recognized as the illustration used on the poster advertising the premiere of The Land of Heart's Desire by William Butler Yeats. Originally, The Land of Heart's Desire had been done as a curtain raiser for John Todhunter's A Comedy of Sighs at the Avenue Theatre in March of 1894. What was the original artwork doing in Shaw's House?

Well the month after Yeats' play premiered, it was performed again at the Avenue Theatre, this time together with the world premiere of Shaw's Arms and the Man. It seems that the Avenue Theatre continued to use the design for other posters as well, including (apparently) Arms and the Man, though I have yet to be able to verify this.

After the Wrights' presentation, we all walked over to the Lincoln Center campus of Fordham University for lunch and the afternoon sessions. I was a part of a session chaired by Jean Reynolds, which included Howard Einsohn talking about Shaw's political address to the American people given at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York in 1933. He was followed by Virginia Costello speaking about how Dorothy Day had dealt with the challenges of charity that Shaw presented in his play Major Barbara. I gave my talk on how Shaw was influenced by Percy Bysshe Shelley's play The Cenci, and Charles Del Dotto finished up the session talking about Shaw and the sublime.

After that, I attended a session on Pygmalion chaired by Ellen Dolgin. Jean Reynolds began the discussion with a paper on the play as meta-drama. She pointed out that it begins with theatergoers having just left a show and Henry Higgins being asked if the trick he does analyzing people's speech allows him to make a living in a music hall. Peter Conolly-Smith then spoke about the history of the German language version of Pygmalion, which actually premiered prior to any English production.

The play was presented for 25 performances in Vienna, then ran for 107 nights in Berlin, before it made its American premiere at the Irving Place Theatre in New York... in German! In fact, the play was also performed in unauthorized productions in Polish and Hungarian (translated from the German) before its London premiere. An American pirated version of the play even appeared in English, horribly reverse-translated from the German version, in some disreputable paper called The New York Times.

Tomorrow, the conference continues with Joseph Hassett speaking about Shaw and Yeats. Michael O'Hara will also be talking about Shaw and the Federal Theatre Project, and both Jennifer Buckley and Mark Lepitre will be speaking on Back to Methuselah. I'm looking forward to it!

Bedlam Hamlet

While I was not as impressed with Bedlam's Hamlet as I was with the company's Saint Joan, I'm very glad I went to see it last night. The first act of the play was the highlight. Actors appeared with flashlights in various parts of the darkened theatre for the opening ghost scene, which managed to be both comedic and legitimately scary. The close of Act I was also amazing. Shakespeare has the ghost crying under the stage with the voice moving about like a mole. I've seen many directors try to get that to work, but Eric Tucker actually did it!

There was an intermission after Act I, and Acts II and III were performed together in three-quarter round. In this part, I got to see Andrus Nichols shine as Gertrude. I missed her performance as Joan of Arc the previous night, instead seeing her remarkably brilliant understudy, so I was pleased to get to see Nichols in Hamlet. She has wonderful chemistry with Tom O'Keefe, who plays Claudius, and there is constant tension onstage between herself and Hamlet, played by Tucker. The play within a play was my favorite part of this section, with each of the actors taking turns playing the prologue, poisoner, and player king and queen, then going back to being the court watching the performance.

After a second intermission, the audience returned for Acts IV and V, performed in the round. The grave diggers, played by Nichols and O'Keefe, carried on a trash bag filled with dirt which they dumped in the middle of the stage. They were hilarious, and their comedy was suitably interrupted by Edmund Lewis entering as a fanatical Laertes.

At three hours and ten minutes, the production was somewhat longer than Shakespeare's company would have taken, but the King's Men inevitably cut the text to suit a particular audience. Bedlam, having decided they would cut essentially nothing, did an admirable job. I would love to see them perform other works as well. (Perhaps my own adaptation of Moby-Dick...)

Bedlam's Saint Joan

Last night I saw Bedlam's production of Saint Joan, which I heartily recommend. It's not often you get to see this massive 1923 epic by George Bernard Shaw. Its sprawling scene and massive cast make it virtually un-produceable for today's impoverished theatre. I remember years ago the Alabama Shakespeare Festival did it in Montgomery, but they had a state-supported budget and legions of interns. How could anyone stage Saint Joan in New York?

Well, Bedlam figured it out. Get a cast a four extraordinarily talented actors, have them perform multiple roles, use modern dress and a simple but innovative set, and just tell story... uncut... using every single word Shaw wrote. The result: brilliant.

Bedlam co-founder Eric Tucker wrote in his director's note that the company was always asking, "What does the audience need in order to get this story?" Well, sometimes it was a pair of glasses to show an actor was portraying a new character. Sometimes is was a funny voice. Sometimes it was taking paint and writing the name of the town on the wall of the set. Sometimes it was the ASM walking onstage and playing a cassette tape. Whatever it was, they did it.

In addition to directing, Tucker plays Warwick, as well as bunch of other parts. The brilliantly comic Edmund Lewis and the often sinister Tom O'Keefe play at least a dozen roles each. The only performer playing a single role is the actress who portrays Joan. I saw the understudy, Samantha Steinmetz, but I don't have a single complaint. She showed Joan's journey from being just a simple country kid with a dream, to being an accomplished soldier, to being a tormented scapegoat, to finally finding peace and becoming a true saint.

Though the dress was modern and the staging unconventional, this was very much Shaw's play as he intended it--in spirit if not in visuals. The first three scenes were staged in three-quarter round with a clipped pace that constantly kept the play moving. Some of the original portrayals of characters were rather broad, but that's pretty much how Shaw wrote them. More nuanced characterization came later.

After the first three scenes, the audience takes its first intermission and is instructed to take all of their belongings outside of the theatre. When they come back, the seating is rearranged, with scene four being played right in the middle of the audience. A sheet behind the audience then comes down, and the audience turns around to watch scene five.

After a second intermission, the audience comes back in to find folding chairs on what previously had been the stage. Scene six, the trial scene, is enacted before them. Joan sits high up on a platform with a beam of light illuminating her face. The other actors move around behind the audience, calling out their lines from the darkness. As we got to Warwick's line, "Hm! I wonder!," I figured that after doing the entire text uncut, Bedlam would drop the epilogue. Nope. The audience was asked to turn their folding chairs around, and behind us was Joan, seated amidst other audience members, ready for the epilogue.

Amazingly enough, the show only runs about three hours even with the two intermissions, and it seems much less than that. The final epilogue, as unnecessary as it is, was truly moving. After seeing Bedlam's staging of Saint Joan, I don't know that I would ever want to see it done another way.

Saint Joan is running in rep with Bedlam's Hamlet at the Lynn Redgrave Theater on Bleeker Street. After seeing how they handled Shaw, I am definitely going back for the Shakespeare. You can find out more about the shows here:

Theatre Bedlam

http://www.theatrebedlam.org/