Sometimes a play, initially successful, fades from memory—and deserves to. As discussed in a prior post of mine, such was the fate of Bye Bye Birdie, which the Roundabout Theatre Co. recently reanimated, with unexpectedly ghoulish results.
The lack of performances—in some cases, relative obscurity—of other pieces is inexplicable and undeserved, though. On the latter list, George Bernard Shaw’s frothy 1910 comedy, Misalliance—which premiered this month 100 years ago at the Duke of York’s Theatre in London—ranks high.
Over the years, other Shaw plays have been performed far more often, either because of ease of staging or a theme judged relevant to the point of urgency (the anti-war Heartbreak House). Misalliance has tended to get lost in that shuffle. It shouldn’t.
Audiences at its first run didn’t quite know what to make of this latest effort from the late-Victorian theatrical provocateur. They largely stayed home, and the reaction from critics gave them no excuse to come out.
Max Beerbohm, for instance, normally an admirer of the Anglo-Irish playwright, complained in the Saturday Review about the characters’ lifelessness, Shaw’s “present habit of writing ‘debates’ instead of plays," and especially the artistic carelessness of it all: “Misalliance is about anything and everything that has chanced to come into Mr. Shaw’s head. It never progresses, it doesn’t even revolve, it merely sprawls.”
The man who helped Shaw avoid the ignominy of a very public closing was King Edward VII—a merry monarch always obliging to the playwright. During the run of John Bull’s Other Island (1904), for instance, the king went into such a fit of laughter that his chair broke.
Six years later, Edward’s assistance was not as freely given: He died. London theaters, observing a period of mourning, closed, including the repertory company that was showing Misalliance as part of its Charles Frohman Repertory Season. Neither Shaw’s play nor the Frohman festival was a success, and the producers quietly chose not to reopen Misalliance after the mourning period ended. It was a case of eleven performances and out.
Shaw was having none of the idea that the play was his fault. He pointed to Frohman as the cause of the difficulties because he “cut out what he considered the highbrow parts of the plays and made the rest unintelligible.”
What might have disconcerted Shaw’s contemporaries—you sense it a bit in Beerbohm’s half-apologetic, half-exasperated response—is that the show does not belong to any single genre. It’s part English drawing-room comedy, part French bedroom farce (all those hiding places!), part Ibsenite-Shavian debate on an issue of the day (or, in Shaw’s case, issues plural—marriage, diplomacy, imperialism, militarism, feminism, etc.), and part something not seen before: the theater of the absurd. (How else to explain an aviatrix—a very new phenomenon in 1910, by the way!—crashing into the greenhouse of a quiet country estate at the exact same time a seemingly meek clerk pops up on the scene with gun in hand?)
Let’s not forget, too, the kind of self-referential jokes you might find in, say, later movie comedies, such as the Bing Crosby-Bob Hope “Road” movies (e.g., in discussing the concept of the “superman,” autodidact-underwear tycoon John Tarleton, thinking of the playwright who created Man and Superman, advises: “Read whatsisname!”)
Revivals 30 and 40 years later lifted the play’s reputation, but there’s still the perception that Shaw is all talk, talk, talk. I don’t buy much of this.
I’m not only unperturbed when I encounter his duels of wit on the printed page, but even on the stage. Look, I’m of Irish extraction, okay? Talk was even more plentiful among my forebears than the grass that springeth green in the old country.
The recent production of this Shavian chestnut—mounted by the Pearl Theatre Co., a New York troupe which specializes in classics—made an excellent argument for more frequent revivals.
I hadn’t planned to see the comedy right away, but the crowds—deprived of the chance to stand in line at the TKTS booth the day before because of one of this winter’s bitter blasts—had come out in full force for a Broadway show that day. The Pearl Theatre offering was the only one that interested me.
Every previous show I had seen performed by the classical repertory company was held at its old home in the Village, at one of my 1980s haunts, the movie revival Theater 80 St. Marks.
Over the last dozen years or so, I probably took in about a half dozen shows there, including a marvelous production of Candida starring Joanna Camp in the title role. Ms. Camp and husband Shepard Sobel, the company’s founding artistic director, moved last year to Albuquerque, N.M.
This first season under the guidance of new artistic director J.R. Sullivan, then, is also the first in the company’s new home at New York City Center Stage II, on 55th Street. I had missed the Pearl’s inaugural production in its new site, John Millington Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World.
But I was pleased to see that the new space retains its old intimacy—seating for 150, in a three-quarter thrust configuration—while presenting enough background space to provide for plenty of action (a necessity in Misalliance, which at various points requires all kinds of scampering around).
The Pearl’s repertory company had a field day with Shaw’s idiosyncratic characters. Particularly droll were Dan Daily in the central role of Tarleton, continually amazed at the unexpected confusion at his estate; Sean McNall as the hapless clerk-turned-anarchist-turned-assassin; and Erica Rolfsrud as the beguiling Polish aviatrix Lina Szczepanowska (the last name is a delicious continuing joke through the second half of the play, along with the rigorous physical-fitness regimen to which Lina subjects her unsuspecting male admirers).
The lack of performances—in some cases, relative obscurity—of other pieces is inexplicable and undeserved, though. On the latter list, George Bernard Shaw’s frothy 1910 comedy, Misalliance—which premiered this month 100 years ago at the Duke of York’s Theatre in London—ranks high.
Over the years, other Shaw plays have been performed far more often, either because of ease of staging or a theme judged relevant to the point of urgency (the anti-war Heartbreak House). Misalliance has tended to get lost in that shuffle. It shouldn’t.
Audiences at its first run didn’t quite know what to make of this latest effort from the late-Victorian theatrical provocateur. They largely stayed home, and the reaction from critics gave them no excuse to come out.
Max Beerbohm, for instance, normally an admirer of the Anglo-Irish playwright, complained in the Saturday Review about the characters’ lifelessness, Shaw’s “present habit of writing ‘debates’ instead of plays," and especially the artistic carelessness of it all: “Misalliance is about anything and everything that has chanced to come into Mr. Shaw’s head. It never progresses, it doesn’t even revolve, it merely sprawls.”
The man who helped Shaw avoid the ignominy of a very public closing was King Edward VII—a merry monarch always obliging to the playwright. During the run of John Bull’s Other Island (1904), for instance, the king went into such a fit of laughter that his chair broke.
Six years later, Edward’s assistance was not as freely given: He died. London theaters, observing a period of mourning, closed, including the repertory company that was showing Misalliance as part of its Charles Frohman Repertory Season. Neither Shaw’s play nor the Frohman festival was a success, and the producers quietly chose not to reopen Misalliance after the mourning period ended. It was a case of eleven performances and out.
Shaw was having none of the idea that the play was his fault. He pointed to Frohman as the cause of the difficulties because he “cut out what he considered the highbrow parts of the plays and made the rest unintelligible.”
What might have disconcerted Shaw’s contemporaries—you sense it a bit in Beerbohm’s half-apologetic, half-exasperated response—is that the show does not belong to any single genre. It’s part English drawing-room comedy, part French bedroom farce (all those hiding places!), part Ibsenite-Shavian debate on an issue of the day (or, in Shaw’s case, issues plural—marriage, diplomacy, imperialism, militarism, feminism, etc.), and part something not seen before: the theater of the absurd. (How else to explain an aviatrix—a very new phenomenon in 1910, by the way!—crashing into the greenhouse of a quiet country estate at the exact same time a seemingly meek clerk pops up on the scene with gun in hand?)
Let’s not forget, too, the kind of self-referential jokes you might find in, say, later movie comedies, such as the Bing Crosby-Bob Hope “Road” movies (e.g., in discussing the concept of the “superman,” autodidact-underwear tycoon John Tarleton, thinking of the playwright who created Man and Superman, advises: “Read whatsisname!”)
Revivals 30 and 40 years later lifted the play’s reputation, but there’s still the perception that Shaw is all talk, talk, talk. I don’t buy much of this.
I’m not only unperturbed when I encounter his duels of wit on the printed page, but even on the stage. Look, I’m of Irish extraction, okay? Talk was even more plentiful among my forebears than the grass that springeth green in the old country.
The recent production of this Shavian chestnut—mounted by the Pearl Theatre Co., a New York troupe which specializes in classics—made an excellent argument for more frequent revivals.
I hadn’t planned to see the comedy right away, but the crowds—deprived of the chance to stand in line at the TKTS booth the day before because of one of this winter’s bitter blasts—had come out in full force for a Broadway show that day. The Pearl Theatre offering was the only one that interested me.
Every previous show I had seen performed by the classical repertory company was held at its old home in the Village, at one of my 1980s haunts, the movie revival Theater 80 St. Marks.
Over the last dozen years or so, I probably took in about a half dozen shows there, including a marvelous production of Candida starring Joanna Camp in the title role. Ms. Camp and husband Shepard Sobel, the company’s founding artistic director, moved last year to Albuquerque, N.M.
This first season under the guidance of new artistic director J.R. Sullivan, then, is also the first in the company’s new home at New York City Center Stage II, on 55th Street. I had missed the Pearl’s inaugural production in its new site, John Millington Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World.
But I was pleased to see that the new space retains its old intimacy—seating for 150, in a three-quarter thrust configuration—while presenting enough background space to provide for plenty of action (a necessity in Misalliance, which at various points requires all kinds of scampering around).
The Pearl’s repertory company had a field day with Shaw’s idiosyncratic characters. Particularly droll were Dan Daily in the central role of Tarleton, continually amazed at the unexpected confusion at his estate; Sean McNall as the hapless clerk-turned-anarchist-turned-assassin; and Erica Rolfsrud as the beguiling Polish aviatrix Lina Szczepanowska (the last name is a delicious continuing joke through the second half of the play, along with the rigorous physical-fitness regimen to which Lina subjects her unsuspecting male admirers).
The Pearl doesn’t appear to have lost its verve one iota in the move uptown. I hope to catch the company while I still can in their current production, an adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Hard Times.
No comments:
Post a Comment