Good Liars

Yesterday was the final day of the Shaw Symposium at Niagara-on-the-Lake. I was pleased to be able to attend the talks as well as plays produced by the Shaw Festival.

On Saturday, Gustavo Rodriguez Martin and Pilar Carretero Caro discussed a corpus-based analysis they did on the letters between Bernard Shaw and Pat Campbell. They wondered, among other things, if Shaw was actually experiencing the emotions he described, something a corpus-based analysis can't determine, as it is unable to detect irony.

Kay Li then spoke about Shaw's play Major Barbara and artificial intelligence. She discussed the challenges of training large language models to prevent hallucinations (in which AI returns factually incorrect information). Next, Audrey McNamara gave a talk on Shaw and the Nobel Prize for Literature, which he won 100 years ago in 2025, though the prize was not awarded until 2026, and Shaw did not receive his medal until 2027.

Since Saturday was Shaw's birthday, we all had cake to celebrate. Then, conference attendees were off to the Royal George Theatre (soon to be torn down in the name of progress) to see a matinee of Major Barbara starring Gabriella Sundar Singh, who is also appearing at the Shaw Festival in a number of roles in Gnit by Will Eno. Following the performance, we had a group discussion with Fiona Byrne, who played both Lady Britomart and Rummy Mitchens, and Andre Morin, who played Adolphus Cusins.

Saturday night, we went to see Dear Liar in the Spiegeltent, which was a wonderful venue. I had previously seen the play at Irish Rep, so I was less excited about it than Major Barbara. However, the play ended up being the highlight of the symposium. Marla McLean played Pat Campbell and Graeme Somerville played Shaw. The production was performed in the round, which generated a wonderful intimacy as the performers recited lines from the letters of two giants of early-twentieth-century British theatre.

Sunday morning, Alice Clapie discussed Shaw's physiological dramaturgy, quoting many of his letters to the actress Elizabeth Robins. Wan Jin then spoke about the novelist Eileen Chang's incorporation of Shaw's ideas into novels like The Rouge of the North and The Fall of the Pagoda, as well as her famous novella Love in a Fallen City. She argued that Chang's work captures the counter-oriental gaze Shaw had employed in his play Arms and the Man.

Toward the end of the Symposium, I chaired a session that included Dibasi Roy and Bandhuli Chattopadhyay. I'm back in New York now, but it's been an amazing past few days.

Missing the Magic

I'm in Niagara-on-the-Lake for the Shaw Symposium. Today, Dorothy Hadfield, the President of the International Shaw Society, welcomed us, and then Pragna Desai, Director of Community Engagement & Outreach for the Shaw Festival, gave a keynote address.

The Shaw Festival has a mandate to perform plays from the lifetime of Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) and works in dialogue with those plays. The theatre is currently raising $150 million to replace the Royal George Theatre and to build two new campuses: an Artists' Village to house theatre professionals and a Center for Lifetime Creativity, which will serve the entire community.

During the keynote address, we also heard about another new initiative, Every Kid in Niagara, which has the goal of bringing all of the students in the Niagara region to see plays at the Shaw Festival at least twice over the course of their academic careers. In order to do this, the festival is partnering with local buses to ensure they have the vehicles (and drivers) necessary. The festival also plans to increase its programing for students.

After the keynote, we headed to the Niagara-on-the-Lake Museum, where Jennifer Buckley and Christopher Wixson led a discussion on Shaw's relationship to the play Peer Gynt by Henrik Ibsen, and how that same play inspired contemporary dramatist Will Eno to write his adaptation, Gnit. Eno's Gnit premiered at Actors Theatre of Louisville in 2013 and is now receiving its Canadian premiere at the Shaw Festival. Sadly, the magical play that inspired Shaw had the life sucked out of it by Eno's adaptation.

I just got back from seeing Gnit, which reminded me of Donmar Warehouse's production of Ibsen's The Lady From the Sea in a new version by Elinor Cook. In that version, the supernatural overtones of the mysterious sailor were eliminated, seriously weakening the play. Peer Gynt doesn't just have supernatural overtones, though. It is a full-on supernatural fantasy complete with trolls, the devil, and other mystical figures appearing on stage. Like Cook, Eno rationalizes everything, leaving only the husk of a once great play.

Incidentally, the Hudson Classical Theater Company in New York is opening their own adaptation of The Lady From the Sea this month, penned by Executive Artistic Director Susane Lee. I have higher hopes for that production. Until I see it, I'll have to content myself with other plays the Shaw Festival has on offer: Shaw's Major Barbara and the two-hander Dear Liar which dramatizes the writer's correspondence with Pat Campbell.

Tomorrow, I'll be seeing both of those, and attending talks by noted Shavians as the Shaw Symposium continues!

Back from Boston

I enjoyed the Dickens Symposium at Boston University last week, where I delivered a paper on theatrical audiences in the works of Charles Dickens.

Boston was a great location to have the symposium, as it was the American city Dickens was fond of most. It's also the birthplace of Edgar Allan Poe, author of the play Politan, as well as some more famous works. The city now has a statue of Poe across the street from Boston Common.

Most of the papers at the conference had nothing to do with drama, though a couple of them did relate Dickens to Poe. Elizabeth Bridgham related the Master Humphrey character who frames The Old Curiosity Shop to Poe's story "A Man of the Crowd" while Katie Bell related another tale published in Master Humphrey's Clock to the famous story "The Tell-Tale Heart."

It was also nice to meet Meoghan Cronin, who was able to tell me about theatre KAPOW in New Hampshire, and to meet up with some old acquaintances, including Jennifer Heine, Claire Woods, Jude Nixon, and Lillian Nayder. I also got to see some of my old stomping grounds in Boston, from when I lived there a quarter century ago. The city has changed, but not as much as New York has over that time.

After getting back from Boston, I was able to squeeze in some theatre, Melissa Maney's Hungry Women at SoHo Playhouse, and Death Becomes Her on Broadway. Tomorrow, I'm off to another symposium, this one sponsored by the International Shaw Society.

The Village Coquettes

Charles Dickens did not have fond memories of The Village Coquettes, an operetta he wrote with composer John Pyke Hullah.

When he was later asked if he owned a copy of it, he reportedly replied, "if I knew it was in my house and could not get rid of it in any other way, I would burn the wing of the house where it was."

Dickens's previous play, The Strange Gentleman, had been a success at the St. James Theatre, then under the direction of the famous tenor John Braham. That had been based on one of his stories in Sketches by Boz, though. The Village Coquettes was doing something decidedly different from his previous work.

The play takes place in an English village in the autumn of 1729. Setting the play more than a hundred years in the past allowed Dickens to present customs and mores considerably different from those of his own days. The plot involves two charming village girls who slight their accepted beaux in favor of a local squire and his foppish friend, Flam.

The character of Lucy was played by the soprano Elizabeth Rainforth, a relatively unknown actress who gained considerable attention for her performance. Lucy is betrothed to the humble farmer George, but gains the attentions of the squire. He urges her to forget George, but she still loves him, and sings some touching lyrics:

        Love is not a feeling to pass away,

        Like the balmy breath of a summer day;

        It is not--it cannot be--laid aside;

        It is not a thing to forget or hide.

        It clings to the heart, ah, woe is me!

        As the ivy clings to the old oak tree.

Lucy's cousin Rose is attached to another young man of humble origins, John, but is flattered by Flam, who is the villain of the piece. Rose admits she enjoys "a little flirtation as much as anyone" and defends her youthful enthusiasm for men in the song "Some Folks Who Have Grown Old."

Eventually, both young women come to realize that they're better off with simple men from the country rather than the rich squire and his unscrupulous city friend. Lucy later tells the squire "call me coquette, faithless, treacherous, deceitful, what you will" but she now sees that George is the "noblest heart, that ever woman won."

For his part, the squire realizes that his life has been dissipated by visits to crowded cities and sings "A Country Life" which has a pleasant and sentimental melody. This elevation of country life over urban values seems strange for Dickens, who wrote so memorably about cities.

After the plot resolves itself and Flam is sent on his way, the play ends with a dance and musical finale. Though the operetta is quite different from the novels that made Dickens famous, it speaks to the engagement the author had with the theatre.

Incidentally, I will be attending a symposium by the Dickens Society next week in Boston, and delivering a paper on the writer's portrayal of audiences. More on that to come!

The City Madam

In the plays of William Shakespeare, the colony of Virginia (named for Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen) shows up only indirectly. Caliban in The Tempest isn't technically a Native American in the New World, though he can certainly be understood that way, and might have been by some of the play's original audience members.

Philip Massinger's play The City Madam gets us a little closer to portrayals of the natives of Virginia, though again somewhat indirectly, since in the context of the play, people are only pretending to be natives. At the end of Act III, Sir John Frugal and his two prospective sons-in-law Lacy and Plenty enter "as Indians." Sir John's plan is to pretend to have retired to a monastery while he grants his estate and the care of his family to his wayward brother Luke.

In the first half of the play, Luke's character seems a bit ambiguous. In his youth, he squandered away his money, but now he is living with his brother. Lady Frugal (the titular City Madam) and her daughters abuse Luke. Has Luke ultimately reformed, or if given the chance, would he once more fall back into his old ways? Sir John plans to test him, and at the same time test his wife and daughters, who have been acting proudly, trying to follow the fashions of the court rather than just live humbly as a citizen of the City of London should.

What the fake "Indians" would have looked like on a 17th-century London stage, I don't know, but the play does give us some idea of how British people in that period might have felt about Virginia. Lacy's father, who is in on the plot, entreats Luke on behalf of Sir John:

            Receive these Indians, lately sent him from

            Virginia, into your house; and labour

            At any rate with the best of your endeavours,

            Assisted by the aids of our divines,

            To make 'em Christians.

Luke, however, worships only money, and makes no attempt to convert the "Indians" to Christianity. Instead, they tell him they have a special arrangement with the devil. If he sends them a virtuous matron and two virgins to be sacrificed in Virginia, they'll send him back an entire mine of gold.

When Luke starts at the name of the devil, the chief "Indian" (Sir John) tells him, "if you / Desire to wallow in wealth and worldly honours, / You must make haste to be familiar with him." The satire here strikes me as more directed at British greed than at the actual religion of native Virginians. Still, the fact that Luke readily believes the natives can supply huge amounts of gold in return for female sacrifices might speak to the fantastic tales Britons received back from the New World.

Luke tells the women that the two daughters will be married off to Indian royalty, but they scorn the idea of emigrating to Virginia. According to one daughter, the people shipped to Virginia are "Condemn'd wretches, / Forfeited to the law" while the other calls them "Strumpets and bawds, / For the abomination of their life, / Spew'd out of their own country." Though the daughters had been portrayed as snobs, I imagine this was a common perception of the British colonists. In fact, Luke says that "Such indeed / Are sent as slaves to labour there."

At the end of the play, Sir John reveals himself. His wife and daughters are repentant, and Sir John turns out his wayward brother. "Hide thyself in some desert, / Where good men ne'er may find thee," he says, "or in justice / Pack to Virginia, and repent." Certainly, in the 17th century, Virginia must have seemed a wild place to Londoners, and a fitting wilderness in which to repent one's sins.

Report of the Special Committee

In 1832, the British parliament issued a report by a select committee formed to investigate the state of dramatic literature.

Edward Bulwer, who would later go on to write the popular plays The Lady of Lyons and Richelieu, chaired the committee. It also included other members of parliament with literary ambitions, including Richard Lalor Sheil.

According to the report, "a considerable decline, both in the Literature of the Stage, and the taste of the Public for Theatrical Performances, is generally conceded." That this was a matter of urgent business for the government seems almost unthinkable today in the U.S.

Of course, the British stage in the early 19th century was also subject to significant regulation. The Licensing Act of 1737 had solidified a virtual monopoly on spoken-word drama held by the Theatres Royal at Drury Lane and Covent Garden. However, according to the select committee, "such privileges have neither preserved the dignity of the Drama, nor, by the present Administration of the Laws, been of much advantage to the Proprietors of the Theatres themselves."

It was not until the passage of the Theatres Act in 1843 that the monopoly was abolished, allowing the so-called "minor theatres" to perform spoken-word drama. Before that, they were limited to a handful of musical genres such as burletta. What exactly is burletta? Well, the committee tried to find out, and discovered no one really knew. According to James Winston, former stage-manager of the Haymarket and Drury Lane, even the Lord Chamberlain himself--who was charged with regulating drama--had difficulty defining burletta.

While two theatres in London had been sufficient during the Restoration era, the city had grown tremendously since then. The sizes of the two patent theatres were enlarged, but there were still only two. J. Payne Collier (who had his own controversies to come) testified before the committee, "the great evil has always been that instead of multiplying theatres in proportion to the increase of population, the proprietors have enlarged theatres."

Collier opined that London playwriting was at low ebb, and the committee seems to have agreed. It would not be until the end of the century that the British theatre would see the playwriting talent of Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde.

Where the Cross is Made

Whaling voyages can make certain men a little obsessed. That's what we learn in Moby-Dick, anyway, a novel I myself have adapted for the stage.

The obsessions of whaling captains also show up in the early plays of Eugene O'Neill. For instance, in O'Neill's play Ile (a New England Yankee pronunciation of "oil") a captain becomes so preoccupied with going after more whale oil that he drives his wife mad.

However, Captain Isaiah Bartlett in O'Neill's Where the Cross is Made has a different obsession. He was on a whaling voyage when he was shipwrecked in the Indian Ocean. There, he and a handful of survivors found a treasure, buried it, and created a map marking the location with a cross.

Bartlett not only obsesses over the treasure, but after the other survivors are killed trying to get it, he passes his obsession on to his son Nat, though his daughter Sue is immune to the madness. O'Neill implies that the treasure exists, but is fake. A bracelet Bartlett returned with turns out to be made of brass with paste jewels rather than real ones. The play makes Bartlett's dream of fortune manifest onstage, though, by having actors playing the drowned crew members cross the stage like ghosts.

Where the Cross is Made premiered in 1918 by the Provincetown Players. Ida Rauh, who directed the production as well as playing Sue, apparently had difficulty staging the ghostly effect that really makes the play stand out as something special. "You'll have to do something about the ghosts, Gene," she reportedly said. "The boys never can look like ghosts, you know it. The audience will simply laugh at them." O'Neill stuck to his vision, and the ghosts stayed.

O'Neill later turned the one-act play into a full-length work called Gold. It opened on Broadway in 1921, but closed after only 13 performances.