Dispatches from Israel 8

by Helen Kaye

[On 10 July, Helen Kaye, my friend who reviews for the Jerusalem Post, sent me a collection of some of her recent notices.  (I just posted two from last spring on 13 July.)  When she asked if I was interested in receiving these pieces (as if I wouldn’t be!), Helen noted that these “imply a comment on current affairs here”—meaning, of course, events and concerns in Israel and the Middle East.  What Helen, who ROTters will recall lives in Tel Aviv, means is that embedded in the plays and reviews are ideas that bear on how Israelis live and think today (even, you may be surprised to find, plays written or set long before Israel even existed).  Because the JP, the major English-language newspaper in Israel, gives Helen so little space for her reviews and because she’s writing primarily for other Israelis who already know most of the references, Helen doesn’t explain or identify them.  For us Americans (and other non-Israelis), I’ll give a brief explanation of some of the events, people, and expressions which Helen mentions.  I’ll provide those explanations following each notice.]

On the Grill

Written and directed by Dror Keren

Cameri Theatre, Tel Aviv; 11 December 2015

The last 15 minutes of Dror Keren’s from-the-heart On the Grill are worth its somewhat rambling (too much small talk), structure, and I was probably not the only one in the vociferously applauding audience with tears in their eyes. Not strictly because of what happens, but because it has to be that way, now, and for the foreseeable future.

The play’s title is actual and a metaphor; a metaphor because we’re all on the rack here [to be explained]. Actual because it’s set in the backyard of a home on a veteran kibbutz in the Jezreel Valley where the family is gathering to celebrate Independence Day, and where Zvika (the peerless Rami Baruch) is getting ready for the traditional Independence Day barbeque.

He’s brought the steaks, the chops, the sausages from the Arab butcher in the nearby village – “What a mob scene! You’ve no idea . . . but he saved them specially for me.” – because the whole family will be together, and the family is a microcosm of today’s Israel.

Grandma Gisella (Miriam Zohar) is a holocaust survivor, was an illegal immigrant, married a kibbutznik and the past. Now she’s in a wheelchair, cared for by Raja (Adam Sheffer) from India. Avinoam (Yossi Kantz), an old and still fiery rebel, is Tirtza’s (Irit Kaplan) dad and she’s rigid with worry because “the situation” may send her son Gilad (Asaf Maron) into combat. His cousin Mordi (Avishai Meridor), suffering from PTSD from a previous war, has been living in Berlin for four years. He’s come for a visit with his non-Jewish German partner Johanna (Lena-Ann Castrup). Also invited is his former lover Alona (Shelly Ben-Yosef), now divorced.

And holding it all together is no-nonsense, practical Rochale, Zvika’s wife, Mordi’s mother.

As the tension builds, as jets roar above, as they watch TV and wait for the phone to ring, it doesn’t take too long before the anger, the resentments explode, before the generations collide, before the present replays the past.

The acting is so good that it seems we’re eavesdropping, not sitting in a theater. Avishai Meridor  and Adam Sheffer need work on diction and body-language respectively, but experience will provide that, and these are quibbles against simply superb ensemble work.

Now for the explanation. We’re on the rack because our lives here are schizophrenic. We live normal lives in an abnormal situation. We realized a dream and are destroying it.

“Is that fireworks, or artillery?” asks (I think) Rochele as explosions split the night sky. That’s our reality here. That’s what On the Grill shows us. Like Hanoch Levin’s Murder, Dror Keren’s On the Grill  is an important play.

[Israeli Independence Day is marked, according to the Hebrew calendar, on 5 Iyar (the eighth month of the secular year; in 2015 that corresponded with 23 April and in 2016, 12 May).  The “dream” to which Helen alludes is, of course, the establishment of a Jewish homeland after the horror and death of the Nazi Holocaust of World War II.  It was “realized” when the State of Israel was established in 1948, but I think Helen sees its destruction in the bad decisions of some of its post-independence leaders and the continuing intransigence of its current administration to any kind of accommodation with Palestinians and its militant rejection by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government of  a two-state path to peace.  (Please note that this is my own interpretation of Helen’s comment, although she’s expressed such sentiments to me often.)]

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To the Edge of the Land

After the novel by David Grossman

Written and Directed by Hanan Snir

Joint production of Habima and Cameri Theatres, Tel Aviv; 14 March 2016

The book has been translated into a score of languages and ecstatically reviewed. The play is in Hebrew. It explains us to ourselves but it’s also the portrait of us that the world doesn’t see encapsulated into a phenomenal, unforgettable, illuminating, wrenching evening at the theater.  Just for that it deserves an English version.

An added and awful irony is that Mr. Grossman’s son Uri was killed in the 2nd Lebanon War while he was close to the end of, but still writing, the book.

For a few years now we’ve been uneasy about ourselves, about where we’re going, about what we’re doing to ourselves (and to others), as a people, as a nation.  As a people, as a nation, we’ve tried to reconcile lives that are lived on the edge of an abyss; to live normally in the fractious spaces between the endless wars.

Our theater reflects this existential dis-ease . It pops up everywhere, in plays like Mr. Snir’s brilliant take on Oedipus Rex, in the edgy, questing offerings at such as the Acre Festival, even in modern classics, such as West Side Story.

The Hebrew title of Edge is A Woman Fleeing Tidings – evil tidings, that is; that awful knock at the door, the ‘tidings’ etched on the serried ranks of military gravestones that punctuate our wars.

Edge starts and ends with war.  Ora (Efrat Ben Zur), Avram (Dror Keren) and Ilan (Amnon Wolf) meet as teens in hospital during the six day war in 1967. The relationship then established somehow endures. Now estranged husband  Ilan is somewhere in South America with their son,  Adam.  Avram lives a half life of agony, fear and regret. Ora plans on a hiking trip to the Galilee with her son Ofer (Daniel Sabbag), whose biological father Avram is. Then, on the day of his demobilization, Ofer gets a special ops call-up from the IDF.

If she flees, Ora’s panicked mind tells her, then she’ll avoid those tidings, then Ofer will be safe. She rousts out Avram, forcing him to go with her. The journey is the story of the ties that bind, that heal, that destroy, the ties of love, of pain, of joys and fears among and for us and the bruised, beautiful, laden land in which we live.

Hanan Snir has set the action in Roni Toren’s high, seemingly doorless, white walled space – itself a metaphor – on whose surface the Galilee will be drawn, and into which are brought the beds, the screens, the stones, and the other bits and pieces needed to move things along. Like an IDF troupe, and moving with military precision, the superb company punctuates this and the action with songs in Hebrew and Arabic.

The versatile Rinat Matatov neatly plays the tambourine, an Arab and a Russian nurse. Guy Mesika as Sami, a wry Arab taxi driver, has a moment of high comedy and desperation as he unleashes an avalanche of curses on Ora and Avram, getting a well-deserved round of applause, as will Ora when she precipitates a different avalanche while making Ofer an “Arabic” (very fine-cut) salad.

Ben Zur, Wolf and Keren drive the play. Watching them, I had to remember to breathe. Had to stop myself from racing up there to comfort them, to encourage them, to hear and listen.

Keren, an expert and deft comedian, here powerfully reaches tragic hero. His stumbling, pitiful, brave Avram unfolds step by painful step. As passionate, impulsive Ora, Ben Zur scales new heights. Wolf impacts boldly as Ilan . . . but then Hanan Snir always coaxes from his actors more than they realize is in them.

To the Edge of the Land will keep you on the edge of your seat. A must see.

[The book by David Grossman, a 62-year-old Israeli author, was published in Hebrew in 2008 and in English (as To the End of the Land) in 2010 by Knopf.  The Second Lebanon War Helen mentions above, also known as the Israel-Hezbollah war, took place in 2006; the First Lebanon War (or the Lebanese Civil War) occurred in 1982.  Hanan Snir’s Oedipus Rex, to which Helen refers, was called Oedipus – A Case Study, and I posted Helen’s review in “Dispatches from Israel 4,” 2 June 2015.  Helen’s reviews of the 2012 Acre (Acco) Festival, posted on 9 November 2012. gives a little background on the annual festival.  The abbreviation “IDF” stands for Israel Defense Forces, the all-service organization of Israel’s army, navy, and air force.]

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Mephisto

By Hillel Mittelpunkt

After the book by Klaus Mann

Directed by Omri Nitzan

Cameri Theatre, Tel Aviv; 16 March 2016

Watching the multilayered, biting Mittelpunkt/Nitzan production of Mephisto, a famous quote comes to mind: “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing”. In other words, we can’t a) sit around like befuddled poultry and let evil grow and/or b) see only what serves our own interests.

We, that is the audience, are ‘a’ and the play indicts all of us. Hendrik Höfgen (Itai Tiran), the hero of Mephisto, stands in for us as ‘b’. Klaus Mann (1906-49) based Hendrik on his one-time [brother]-in-law, the actor/manager Gustaf Gründgens (1899-1963), insinuating that the latter collaborated with the Nazis.

“What do they want from me, I’m only an actor,” grumbles Hendrik at the end of the play, refusing even then to recognize that he has sold his soul to the devil to get what and where he wants. Driven, relentlessly ambitious, Hendrik will climb over anything and anybody for fame and recognition.

“Politics and theater don’t mix,” he says impatiently to Nicoletta (Helena Yarolova) his Lesbian colleague, but they will when Hitler comes to power in 1933, and he’ll let them because he’s unwilling (or unable) to make connections, and that takes him from Hamburg to the National Theater in Berlin, to prominence as its director, to fame for his Mephisto, the role he’s wanted all his life, and to the betrayal of former friends whom he sheds like old skin when they might endanger his future. Like his wife Barbara (Anastasia Fein), his black mistress Juliette (Ruthy Asarsay), his mentor and colleague – they’re Jews – Krug and Beck (Eli Gorenstein and Simha Barbiro), and all the rest.

Roni Toren’s set puts us on a stage of the stage where the entrances and exits are among racks of clothing, racks that will change dramatically for act II, where upstage are curtains and the footlights of the stage’s stage. Keren Granek’s lighting takes us from place to place, mixing light, shadow and darkness. Wagner and Mendelssohn make musical points alongside period music, and Polina Adamov dresses the women (not all) in sexy underwear and deprives the men of their shirts – it’s time for Omri Nitzan to leave his actors’ underwear where it belongs – under clothing. We get the often-made point that underwear reflects vulnerability.

But Mephisto will still stand among his greatest productions because the whole – we’ll get to the acting in a moment – is like a fist to the soul.

“Think” it commands. “Don’t just sit there. Don’t just talk about it. Act. We are striding down the wrong path and it will destroy us.”

“To be an actor is to know how to change masks,” says Hendrik and Tiran’s achievement in the role is that we don’t believe him as Hendrik because he never lets us see the real Hendrik, except once when the General (alias Herman Goering) verbally flays him to the bone. The phenomenal Dudu Niv plays Goering as the bully he was, reveling in the role and the power the Reich affords him, and Hendrik stands there quivering, the naked nobody he believes himself to be. Onstage, masked by the role, he’s powerful.

No wonder he’s exhausted by play’s end.

Eli Gorenstein magnificently plays three different roles: He’s Krug, manager of the Hamburg theater, Hendrik’s mentor, cynical, warm-hearted and a political realist. He’s Bruckner, Barbara’s stiff-necked, stiff-minded father. He’s von Munk, fanatical Nazi and cleanser of German Culture; and Gorenstein has different body language, stance and speech for each of them.

Asarsay has gone deep into herself for Juliette and has emerged with her most powerful performance to date, especially the scene in which she urges Hendrik to inform on her.

Yaralova’s lovely Nicoletta is wary, compassionate, and like Krug, a realist. Irit Kaplan too shines in her roles, among them the pathetic Actress and the quietly assured Leidenthal. Simcha Barbiro’s anxious, brave Beck is excellent.

Indeed, the entire cast can pat itself on the back for a job well done.

Ours is still to come, and we’d better get to it.

[The quotation Helen uses at the beginning of her review is usually attributed to the great (and much-quoted) Irish statesman, Edmund Burke (1729-97), but the fact is, its actual source is unknown and doesn’t appear in any of Burke’s published writings.  The statement has been used, in various forms, by many public figures, including John F. Kennedy, but its origins are obscure.  Novelist Klaus Mann, the son of Thomas Mann, wrote Mephisto in 1936; the role Helen says Hendrik Höfgen “wanted all his life” is Mephistopheles, the Devil’s representative, in Goethe’s Faust.  (I published a three-part article on “Faust Clones” and I discuss Goethe’s version in Part 1, posted on 15 January 2016.)  Field Marshal Hermann Goering (or Göring; 1893-1946), was commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, the German air force in the Third Reich.]

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Blood Wedding

By Federico Garcia Lorca

Translated by Rina Litvin

Directed by Kfir Azulay

Beersheva Theater, Beersheba; 3 May 2016

The beginning of Kfir Azulay’s vision for Blood Wedding is so visually dramatic that your breath almost stops; and indeed, where do you go from there? Headlong into a dark tale driven by a culture of blood and death, death, blood, greed, and lust, and played out amid darkness in Yehudit Aharon’s tall black box of a set that’s lit by moveable rows of globe lamps, serried ranks of little moons, and the moon – as we know – is a symbol for lunacy and death. The costumes (also Aharon) are also mostly black.

None of the characters, except one, have names. They’re called by their function; the Bridegroom (Tom Avni), the Bride (Avigail Harari), the Mother (Shiri Golan), and so forth. The exception is Leonardo (Tom Hagi) because seen or unseen, he’s the catalyst for all that follows. Seen or unseen, he is Nemesis; Azulay deliberately draws parallels to classic Greek tragedy: the Young Girls and the Young Men, innocence gone, are here a black-clad chorus. The prescient Woodcutters become the Three Fates.

Symbolism abounds in the songs set to Elad Adar’s marvelous music with its deliberate dissonances, songs to the stallion (rampant masculinity, potency), to being a bride (innocence, desire), to the treacherous moon, the vagaries of fate.

How did Shakespeare put it?

“There’s a divinity that shapes our ends/Rough hew them how we will . . . ” (Hamlet).

The hard facts of the tragedy? Approving the unity of their extensive lands, the Mother, and the Father of the Bride (Yonatan Tcherchy) approve the uniting of the Bride and Bridegroom. But the Bride was once engaged to Leonardo, a romance the Father ended because Leonardo was poor. The wedding is celebrated – the reception is brilliantly portrayed by shadows on a sheet like a Javanese puppet play – but before the lustful Bridegroom can consummate the union, the Bride and Leonardo run away together. Inevitably he and the Bridegroom die and the Mother, who has lost both husband and elder son to clan conflict, is now bereft of all her men.

And how many here are in a similar situation? On both sides?

It’s the Mother, bitter, relentless, unforgiving, who is the center of Blood Wedding. She’s a stretch for any actress, but Ms. Golan is more than any actress and she latches onto the Mother like a hungry shark. Hungry also describes Tom Hagi’s restless, powerful and powerfully sensual Leonardo. There’s a viscerally erotic scene between him and the Bride in the forest.

Tom Avni’s neatly nebech Bridegroom tries to project a masculinity he hasn’t got, while Harari’s Bride is beautifully torn between her fear of and her desire for passion aka Leonardo.

The always versatile Tcherchy makes the corrupt Father a work of art – the handkerchief floating from his little finger is inspired while Ora Meirson, though her reading of the Wife (Zohar Meidan) lacks nothing, scales a new summit as Death with her dispassionate, ironic reporting of what has been, and what now is, that the two young men are so uselessly “killed for love . . ./With a knife/that penetrates deep/through the startled flesh . . .” as the Mother says.

Azulay intends, I think, to jolt us, to jerk us into awareness of what we’re doing here, and he nearly succeeds, so very nearly. If only he had let his (and Lorca’s) perceptions do their own talking but he’s so busy signalling ‘Pay Attention, This Is Important’ that the message itself falters.

[Spanish dramatist Federico García Lorca, (1898-1936) wrote the poetic tragedy Blood Wedding, based on a true story, in 1933.  (A supporter of leftists in Spain, Lorca was executed in 1936 by Francisco Franco’s right-wing Falangists.)   Helen labels the Bridegroom as played by Tom Avni as a nebech, a Yiddish word that’s often spelled and pronounced as nebbish in English.  According to Leo Rosten (The Joys of Yiddish, McGraw-Hill, 1968), who’s definitions are amazingly complete and delightfully amusing, a nebech is an “innocuous, ineffectual, weak, helpless or hapless unfortunate.  A Sad Sack.  A ‘loser.’”  (I find it droll that Helen uses a Yiddish characterization for a character in a classic Spanish play!  Droll, but not inaccurate.)]

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The Actress

By Gur Koren

Directed by Gilad Kimchi

Bet Lessin, Tel Aviv; 30 June 2016

“Man proposes, God disposes” is what springs to mind after watching The Actress, Gur Koren’s perceptive, wickedly funny morality play on who we are today in the light of what we were, or might have been, yesterday. Right on p. 1 of the program there’s Koren’s vigorous disclaimer: “the play, based on [some] actual persons now deceased, is an imaginary tale . . . sections of which have no basis in reality.”

That’s fine, because the reality, as happens so often in our little land, might have been even less believable, probably bloodier, and as aspiring actress Shlomit (Neta Garty) tartly says “In this country, if you manage to escape a situation, be assured it’ll catch up with you.”

Let’s start with Orna Smorgonsky’s spot-on period costumes, Eran Atzmon’s admirable Li-La-Lo backstage set of big boxes, some of which open up into things like a bathroom, or jail cell, and with Yoav Cohen’s vibrant video art for which the boxes act as screen. Li-La-Lo (1944-54) was a popular variety stage. Another popular hangout to appear in the play is the then-Café Pilz – with owner Arye Pilz urbanely played by Lior Michaeli – down by the beach and now a McDonald’s.

The action takes place in 1947 marked by a) Etzel and/or Lehi resistance or b) Etzel and/or Lehi terrorism (depending which side you were on) against the British mandatory authorities, the saga of the Exodus and the historic November 29 UN vote approving the establishment of the State.

Shlomit, the not-so-successful aspiring actress, is backup for Shoshana Damari (Eti Vakhnin-Sober) at Li-La-Lo. She is tasked by her brother Aaron (Nadav Nates), a member of the Etzel, to lure to an Etzel safe-house English officer Adam Shinwell (Lior Baranes), son of the then UK Labor minister Emmanuel Shinwell. The aim is prisoner exchange – one Brit for three condemned Etzel men.

But, what with one thing and another, actually quite an entertaining lot of them, one of which is that Adam and Shlomit fall in love, the plan doesn’t work out, and at the end actual reality (more or less) transcends people’s dreams.

Gilad Kimchi’s direction is, and bravo, deliberately, a tad over the top and it works very well. Even better for us English speakers, the English actually speak English, albeit with atrocious Israeli accents (dialogue coach anyone?). Surtitles provide the Hebrew. 

Garty, Baranes, Nates dig with gusto into their roles, as do the other members of the ensemble, mentioning especially Zviki Levin as the very nimble manager of Li-La-Lo, Vakhnin-Sober as the temperamental Damari and Maayan Weissberg as blissfully self-centered Hanna Meierzak, better known to us all as the late and lamented Hanna Meron

Chuckles, giggles, titters punctuate the play throughout, but there’s only one real belly laugh. No, I’m not going to be the spoiler. Have fun. Go see it yourselves.

[Helen writes of Li-La-Lo, which was an Israeli vaudeville or music hall  theater in the middle of the last century; Café Pilz operated from 1938 to 1951 and then reopened in 1982 and operated until 2009.  (Arye Pilz lived from 1908 until 1992.)  She also invokes two paramilitary organizations of the Jewish struggle against the British Mandate in Palestine in the years before World War II and the establishment of the State of Israel: the Etzel and the Lehi.  Etzel was another name for the Irgun, essentially an anti-British guerrilla/terrorist force (of which former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin was a member); Lehi was also known as the Stern Gang, a militant Zionist force which split from Irgun in 1940.  The 29 November UN vote to which Helen refers above was, of course, the 1947 United Nations resolution to partition Palestine into Jewish and Muslim states.  (The passage of the UN resolution was the starter’s gun for Israel’s War of Independence.)  Hanna Meron (more often spelled Maron; 1923-2014) was a Berlin-born Israeli actress who held the world’s record for the longest career in theater.  She was much honored and many Israeli actors name her as an inspiration and model.

[Helen’s previous contributions to ROT include “Dispatches” 1 through 7 on 23 January 2013, 6 August 2013, 20 November 2013, 2 June 2015, 22 August 2015 (which also includes an article Helen wrote on the Israel Festival), 6 October 2015, and 13 July 2016.  (I also posted another of Helen’s JP reviews, Molière’s Tartuffe, on 2 November 2014 as a Comment to “Dispatches 3.”) ROTters might also enjoy looking back at ”Help! It’s August: Kid-Friendly Summer Festivals in Israel,” 12 September 2010; ”Acre (Acco) Festival, Israel,” 9 November 2012; “Berlin,” 22 July 2013; “A Trip to Poland,” 7 August 2015.]

'Life Among the Ruins'

[In part 5 of Kirk Woodward’s series “Re-Reading Shaw,” which I posted on ROT on 2 September, he introduces a short piece called “Cymbeline Refinished” from 1937.  According to Kirk, Shaw “wrote an alternate ending [to Shakespeare’s play] that does not require unusual staging.”  Since Shaw rewrote William Shakespeare’s ending for Cymebline , I thought I might use that as an excuse to post my “archival” review of New York Shakespeare Festival’s production (directed in 1989 by JoAnne Akalaitis, Joseph Papp’s successor, as part of the NYSF’s multi-year Shakespeare Marathon).

[The following reviews were published together in the New York Native of 19 June 1989.  The Native  ran reviews in pairs, so there are two plays in the column.  (The paper gave me so many words for both plays, but I could divide them up any way I wanted.)  I saw the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theater’s Cymbeline, which ran between 9 May and 25 June 1989, in May and the Circle Repertory Company’s Florida Crackers, 17 May-25 June,  in June.  Even though the Florida Crackers review is totally unrelated to Cymbeline or Shaw, I’m leaving the two co-published pieces together here because . . . well, that’s the way they appeared in print 27 years ago.]

CYMBELINE

by William Shakespeare

New York Shakespeare Festival

Public Theater/Newman Theater

The ninth production in Joe Papp’s Shakespeare Marathon, Cymbeline certainly has elements of a gothic romance: twisted plots, separated lovers, lost and stolen children, disguises, poisons and potions, and ghosts.  A plot too complex to synopsize here—the program includes a page-and-a-half précis—it befits opera or all-day Kabuki.  It seems appropriate, therefore, that JoAnne Akalaitis sets her production in the mid-nineteenth century of Dickens, Austen, and Poe.  The final scene, with the entire cast unraveling the dozen or so complications, outstrips Gilbert and Sullivan. 

The shadowy, often fog-shrouded production, on George Tsypin’s chameleon set moodily dance-lit by Pat Collins, is over three hours long, but has such verve and energy it seems only half that.  The gothic ambience is enhanced by Philip Glass’s score of romantic viola with percussive counterpoint.

Sounds of a thunderstorm establish the atmosphere about fifteen minutes before curtain.  (Perhaps it was the air-conditioning, but I actually began to feel chilly.)  Then, two gentlemen complete with umbrellas step through the curtains and fill us in on the marriage of King Cymbeline’s daughter, Imogen, to impoverished Posthumus; the latter’s banishment to Italy, and the mysterious disappearance of Cymbeline’s two sons.  The curtain opens on “Celtic ruins” covered by heavy ground fog, lit sparsely from above and the sides.  Two large, square columns are center stage, the floor is covered with runic drawings and a Stonehenge-like ruin is projected on the backdrop. 

Scenes in England, Italy and Wales are quickly created by new configurations of the columns and new projections of forests, caves, walls and interiors—even a rippling stream.  The projections, black- or sepia-and-white, are unspecific, often fragmentary, and, combined with the shadowy lighting, evoke impressions rather than literal pictures.  In this way, Tsypin’s set accommodates the swiftness of Akalaitis’s direction, which moves the production without turning it into a headlong rush. 

The brooding elements, though constant, still permit Akalaitis occasional whimsy.  Twice, for instance, Cymbeline (George Bartenieff) on his throne is flown onstage from the wings, and Iachimo, gathering false evidence of Imogen’s seduction, peeks shyly down the sleeping princess’s bodice.  Broader humor is generated by Cloten, the Queen’s oafish son, played by a chubby Wendell Pierce.  His physical appearance, accentuated by an absurd page-boy mop of hair and outlandish clothes of clashing patterns and colors, belies the earnestness with which Pierce plays his lust for Imogen and his thirst for revenge on Posthumus.  The contrast, occasionally off-putting—especially when Pierce tries too hard—is often hilarious.

There is also considerable charm in the performances of Joan Cusack as Imogen, Jeffrey Nordling as Posthumus, Peter Francis James as Posthumus’ loyal servant Pisanio, Michael Cumpsty (who here resembles Robert Goulet or the late Guy Williams, TV’s Zorro) as the oily Iachimo, Frederick Neumann as the wrongly banished Belarius, and Jesse Borrego and Don Cheadle as Cymbeline’s long-lost sons Polydore and Cadwal.  These last two, it must be added, display virtuosic acrobatics in their several fights, and, as feral innocents, may be the most confused characters in the convoluted circumstances, for they fall naïvely in love with Imogen, disguised as a boy, not knowing that she is a woman, a princess and their sister.  The audience clearly appreciated Borrego’s and Cheadle’s performances, for their curtain call received the loudest applause.

Cusack is strong and stalwart, though her voice has a hoarseness that precludes much vocal variety despite the obvious emotional variety the actress commands.  Still, I found her more forceful and sympathetic here than in her last New York appearance, Circle Rep’s Brilliant Traces.  Joan MacIntosh’s Queen, a sort of Junior League Lady Macbeth crossed with a real-life version of Snow White’s queen, would be easy to caricature as a dragon lady, but MacIntosh and Akalaitis keep to a believable level of evil. 

Cumpsty’s unctuous smarminess as Iachimo, a sleaze if ever there was one, is clear without being telegraphed.  As a rake, he presses Imogen, importunes her fervently and then backs off quickly when she refuses him.  Having snuck into her bedroom while she is asleep, Cumpsty peeps down her nightgown with puerile glee, showing what a little boy this poseur really is.  Without this detail, the audience probably couldn’t forgive him, as Imogen and Posthumus do, for the near tragedy he causes.

Among the production’s remarkable moments is a choreographed battle with stylized individual combat, a slow-motion mass attack—and a leap by Borrego from a ten-foot-high ramp into a crowd of enemy soldiers.  Later, there is a literal deus ex machina as Jupiter, in the guise of boy alto Jacob White, sings an aria suspended on a giant bird. 

As steadily as it keeps its many balls in the air, Akalaitis’s Cymbeline is not without problems, however.  Whimsical as it is, the flying throne comes, literally and dramatically, out of nowhere.  And the good performances aside, it is momentarily troublesome that Cymbeline and his first queen should have a white daughter, a black son and an Hispanic son.  More difficult to accept is that Imogen, awakening from a drugged, death-like sleep, would mistake the headless corpse of Cloten, a stout black man, for her husband, a tall, slim white man.  (Cloten was wearing Posthumus’ clothes, but rather than explaining the confusion, that only raises the question how the tubby prince could fit into them.)  Also, the director includes Posthumus’ ghostly family, who appear to him in a dream shimmering like translucent holograms, in other scenes throughout the play, as if they are silently watching over the events of the story.  This presence seems unnecessary; however, like Akalaitis’s other inventions, it doesn’t ultimately harm the production. 

As the audience left, one spectator concluded that Cymbeline is the strongest entry so far in the Marathon.  I can’t necessarily go along with the exclusivity—James Lapine’s Winter’s Tale still stands out for the acting and individual character portrayals—but Akalaitis has unquestionably put together a marvelously atmospheric and theatrical spectacle.

FLORIDA CRACKERS

by Wm. S. Leavengood

Circle Repertory Company

There is a public service TV commercial that shows two young men sitting around a bedroom smoking pot.  One says he doesn’t believe marijuana is dangerous; after all, they’ve smoked it since they were twelve and nothing’s happened to them.  Then the man’s mother asks if he’s even looked for a job that day.  “No, ma,” he answers, and the voice-over declares, “Marijuana can make nothing happen to you, too.”  That, in a thirty-second spot, is what Wm. S. Leavengood seems to be saying over two hours in Florida Crackers. 

In John Bishop’s hyperrealistic production, in which real eggs are cooked, real sand is spread over the Circle rep’s stage and aisles and real barbells are bench-pressed, brothers Joe (John C. McGinley), Grant (Michael Piontek) and Russell (Scott Rymer) essentially dream their lives—and inheritance—away as they smoke, snort, deal, and deliver pot and coke around St. Petersburg, Florida.  Too enervated to do anything else, they know only one way to make money for their various pipe dreams.  It’s an unpoetic, brutish Iceman Cometh à la 1979.

The boys’ favorite song is the Eagles’ “Take It to the Limit” (1975) whose key line seems to be “I’ve always been a dreamer.”  Seven scenes spread over two acts reveal the lassitude of the brothers and their friends and lovers until they are finally galvanized by Grant’s arrest for transporting pot.  As to why these former preppies don’t break out of their self-destructive rut, the play’s only explanation is the description of fish caught in the deadly red tide: even though the algae will inevitably poison or suffocate the fish, they don’t swim away because they don’t know any better.

A talented cast, a detailed set (by John Lee Beatty), and appropriate but uninspired direction, however, can’t make these people interesting or worthy of sympathy.  Their lives weren’t ruined by some outside force against which we can root for them to struggle; they are victims of their own selfishness and inertia.  They get what they deserve.

[In my commentary on Kirk Woodward’s book The Art of Writing Reviews (Merry Press/Lulu, 2009), I related an anecdote that pertains to my New York Native review of Cymbeline, the one republished here.  In Part 3 of “The Art of Writing Reviews by Kirk Woodward” (11 November 2009), I wrote that after a contretemps I had in print with John Simon, New York magazine’s drama reviewer, over The Winter’s Tale, an earlier entry in the NYSF marathon, my Cymbeline notice was published.

On 19 June, however, my review of another NYSF production, Cymbeline (part of NYSF’s then-ongoing marathon of all Shakespeare’s plays over about a decade), came out in the Native and unbeknownst to me, the editors had put a banner headline on the front page of the edition saying, “Hey, John Simon: We Loved Cymbeline.”  Simon had obviously panned Cymbeline (12 June)--it was a controversial production under the direction of JoAnne Akalaitis--but the banner was clearly more directed at my difference of opinion with Simon over Winter’s Tale.

[In a later section of my comments, I quoted Kirk’s statement that “reviewers often are not responsible for headlines” and other accompaniments to their columns.  Though most of my reviews did appear under headlines of my own devising, I not only had no hand in writing that banner about Cymbeline that baited John Simon, but I didn’t even know about it until the issue came out.  Since my deadline was often 10 days before the issue date, I’d written my copy before Simon’s negative review of Cymbeline hit the stands.  (I no longer subscribed to New York and didn’t seek out Simon’s reviews anyway; I wouldn’t have known about his response to the play until someone told me about it.)]

Re-Reading Shaw – Plays from 1934 to 1950

by Kirk Woodward

[This is the final installment of Kirk Woodward’s series of commentaries on George Bernard Shaw from his reading of the Complete Plays with Prefaces (Dodd, Mead & Company, 1963).  The four previous parts, covering the plays written from 1885 to 1902, 1901 to 1909, 1909 to 1920, and 1918 to 1933, were posted on ROT on 3 and 18 July and 8 and 23 August, respectively, and I recommend going back, either before reading part 5 or afterwards, to catch up on Kirk’s thoughts on the great playwright—not so much because part 5 is informed by what came before but because Kirk’s considerations are more than worth reading for their own sakes.  (In my introduction to part 4, I noted that Kirk’s written on ROT before about GBS and listed his past blog articles. I also recommend having a good look at those as well.)]

THE SIMPLETON OF THE UNEXPECTED ISLES (1934 / 1935) – People in society are known by the company they keep, and Shaw’s plays are often known by the prefaces they consort with. This play suffered because of the reputation of its “Preface on Days of Judgment.”

It begins calmly enough, with Shaw’s usual sleight-of-hand switching of categories:

When we refuse to believe in the miracles of religion for no better reason fundamentally than that we are no longer in the humor for them we refill our minds with the miracles of science, most of which the authors of the Bible would have refused to believe.

Religion is the mother of skepticism: Science is the mother of credulity. There is nothing that people will not believe nowadays if only it be presented to them as Science, and nothing they will not disbelieve if it be presented to them as religion. I myself began like that; and I am ending by receiving every scientific statement with dour suspicion while giving very respectful consideration to the inspirations and revelations of the prophets and poets.

This mild scrambling of preconceptions suddenly takes a sharp turn:

But what of the people who are incapable of restraint except that of intimidation? Must they not be either restrained or, as the Russians gently put it, liquidated.

Then Shaw, for not the last time making a fool of himself over the Soviet Union, gives a merry and sanitized rationale for the state murders carried out by Lenin and Stalin, which gives an unpleasant punning quality to the term “Days of Judgment.” This effect spilled over into Simpleton, and many saw in it a similar enthusiasm for improving the world by killing people.

The Simpleton itself has no explicit relation to its dire preface, except in one ugly passage:

If the angels fail us we shall set up tribunals of our own from which worthless people will not come out alive. When men no longer fear the judgment of God, they must learn to judge themselves.

Aside from its enthusiasm for governmental murder, The Simpleton is Shaw at his most avant garde. It must have been quite a novelty for its first audiences. “Why don’t you do The Simpleton?” Shaw once asked a producer. “It is a lovely play.”

It is certainly a most interesting one. Not to keep harping on age, but Shaw was nearly eighty when he wrote it. It is unusual, imaginative, daring; for the time its ideas about polygamy and mixed-race marriage were shocking. The dialogue is consistently clever.

Three little scenes (the Prologue) introduce us to the Isles – tropical lands that have recently emerged from the sea – and we observe their oddness and unsuitability for normal British ideals. A place, in other words, where strange things can happen.

We then see the Simpleton – a nebbish of an Anglican clergyman – explore what the Isles, in succeeding years, have become. Four people – two English, two not – have become the group parents of four children, to all appearances the most beautiful young people imaginable.

But the Day of Judgment arrives, and it turns out to be the day of Shaw’s judgment:

The Day of Judgment is not the end of the world, but the end of its childhood and the beginning of its responsible maturity.

The four children are among those who just disappear. They were Ideals – their real names were Love, Pride, Heroism, and Empire. So there is a thematic relation between the play and the preface after all. Those who do not work and produce, as Shaw sees they should, ought to and will disappear – however that happens.

“The Six of Calais” (1934) dramatizes Jean Froissart’s (c. 1337-c. 1405) story of the six merchants who surrender to King Edward III to be hanged in return for his lifting the siege of their city, and whose lives are spared through the queen’s intervention (from Froissart’s Chronicles). Shaw adds a twist to the story that gives it a lively comic ending.

In his fine preface Shaw claims that in this play “I am not driving at anything more than a playwright’s direct business,” which is that

Life as we see it is so haphazard that it is only by picking out its key situations and arranging them in their significant order (which is never how they actually occur) that it can be made intelligible. . . . All interpreters of life in action, noble or ignoble, find their instrument in the theatre; and all the academic definitions of a play are variations of this basic function.

Despite Shaw’s disclaimer, it is worth noting that the play does present a revolt of the proletariat of the time against the ruling power structure, and that the religious expressions of the six burghers are distinctly Protestant.

THE MILLIONAIRESS (1935 / 1936) – in his “Preface on Bosses,” Shaw identifies, but does not solve, an issue that afflicts Democratic societies but equally bedevils Socialist thought: the fact that some people rise to the top, whatever that “top” may be, regardless of the obstacles, and often the laws, around them.

Both Socialism and Democracy promote equality; but the fact is that some people cannot help triumphing over circumstances. They seem to make money in spite of themselves; or they get into higher and higher positions of power, or both. (This can even happen in the United States!)

The tyranny of the talented individuals will remain. Again I ask what are we to do with them in self-defence? . . . The problem is how to make sure that the decisions shall be made in the general interest and not solely in the immediate personal interest of the decider.

It comes as a shock to realize that Shaw, who has solutions for everything, has no solution for this problem, except that we become more aware of the situation and its dangers. “What are we to do with such people?” he keeps asking.

Worse, he can’t help admiring them, as his descriptions of Mussolini and Hitler in the preface make clear. Hasn’t he urged the Superman on us? Could they by any chance be Supermen?

The Millionairess uses money as the arena for demonstrating this dilemma – it stays out of politics, although the same points apply. Epifania, the title character, finds herself required to raise a large amount of money out of almost nothing, and she does. Shaw calls the play:

a comedy of humorous and curious contemporary characters such as Ben Jonson might write were he alive now.

The comparison with Jonson (1572-1637, author of Volpone and The Alchemist) is apt in the sense that Jonson wrote comedies that are forceful but difficult to stage successfully. So is The Millionairess. Katherine Hepburn, Shaw’s ideal for the role, did play it on stage, and must have been perfect for it with her brittle voice and angular bearing. Aside from Hepburn’s performance, the play has proven problematic.

Epifania, the title character, is driven, focused, and humorless. “There is nothing one can get,” she says, “but more money.” She ignores any other values. She is a parody of Shaw’s women who are miles ahead of the men around them. Epifania is miles ahead of everyone, but not in the service of Life, just in the service of herself.

Does she remind the reader of anyone?

SAGAMORE. He is taking an action against you.

EPIFANIA. An action! Very well: you know my invariable rule. Fight him to the last ditch, no matter what it costs. Take him to the House of Lords if necessary. We shall see whose purse will hold out longest. I will not be blackmailed.

If you read the role in the voice of, say, a billionaire you envision, you will understand the feel of the whole play. At the end of the play, Epifania has gotten everything she wants; some people have benefited from her activities, some have suffered from them; but she is indifferent to all results except that she is on top.

I am surprised at how highly I think of this play, contrary to my expectations. Shaw isn’t preaching, he’s presenting, and, like Ben Jonson, presenting without sentimentality. Productions that offer the play as a fun evening of theater probably won’t work. But if Shaw isn’t offering easy solutions, he’s identifying a problem, or trying to. All the more credit to him.

“Cymbeline Refinished” (1937) – Shaw scorned the last act of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline for years as jumbled and confusing. When he was invited to write a new fifth act for a production, he read the play again.

I began by reading the authentic last act carefully through. I had not done so for many years, and had the common impression about it that it was a cobbled-up affair by several hands, including a vision in prison accompanied by scraps of quite ridiculous doggerel. For this estimate I found absolutely no justification nor excuse. . . . My notion that it is a cobbled-up pasticcio by other hands was an unpardonable stupidity. The act is genuine Shakespear to the last full stop, and late phase Shakespear in point of verbal workmanship.

However, Shaw also realized that the only way to do the act successfully is to do it full-out, in particular the masque, which requires special handling. So he wrote an alternate ending that does not require unusual staging.

To my ear his verse, although it scans as iambic pentameter, is not otherwise poetic. But the act is efficient, and Shaw excuses himself: “All I can say is that the temptation to [rewrite someone else’s play], and sometimes the circumstances which demand it, are irresistible.”

GENEVA (1939) again looks at politics, but this time the setting is the League of Nations instead of Downing Street, and the cast of characters features the dictators of the time, stand-ins for Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco (but not, notably, Stalin).

The preface, on the other hand, was written in 1945, six years later, after World War II was over.

It seems to me to go off the rails after a while, in its summary of Hitler’s and Mussolini’s careers (“those poor devils”), and in its repetition of the hope that the human species will achieve longer life spans.

Shaw could hardly resist drawing morals not based on experience, and making predictions based on the idea that everyone else thought the way he did.

But it is fascinating to see how the war and the world looked to an intelligent man in 1945, and much of the preface is highly quotable:

England will do nothing outside her routine until she is thoroughly frightened; but when England is frightened England is capable of anything.

The drawback to England’s capacity for doing impossible things when in danger is her incapacity for doing possible things (except repeating what was done last time) in security.

It is sometimes better not to think at all than to think intensely and think wrong.

Ethical victories endure. Discoveries cannot be guaranteed for five minutes.

At the age of 89, Shaw seems less certain of his ideas about the Life Force than in earlier years. He writes for example that

Civilizations have never finally survived: they have perished over and over again because they failed to make themselves worth their cost to the masses whom they enslaved.

Do the “experiments” of the Life  Force have any value if they can’t be passed on? Shaw says, in fact:

All the evidence available so far is to the effect that since the dawn of history there has been no change in the natural political capacity of the human species.

On the other hand,

            It is life that is natural and infinite.

Infinite? Really? In that case – but I digress.

Shaw says that he found the key for the tone of Geneva in a translation of the comedies of Aristophanes by his friend Gilbert Murray. The result is a play of remarkable vigor for any playwright, much less one 83 years old. It is a farce, and the characterizations, as is the case in On the Rocks (part 4), have no depth, nor are they meant to.

Played with energy and speed, it must have delighted its first audiences, with its topical references to current international relations that Shaw kept rewriting as the news changed. The first production ran for a remarkable 237 performances in London, followed by a tour.

Then World War II broke out, and the play plummeted in popularity. It is hard to read it today, with its back and forth debates of rational concepts. It was not robust enough to account for the activities of dictators who turned out to be both brutal, irrational, and genocidal.

“IN GOOD KING CHARLES’S GOLDEN DAYS” (1939) is a title taken from the old satirical ballad “The Vicar of Bray.” The play brings together on stage not only Charles II but, among others, Isaac Newton, Charles Fox (the founder of the Quakers), the actress Nell Gwynn, and the artist Godfrey Kneller (who was included because Shaw’s first choice, William Hogarth, could not quite be fitted in the play’s date of 1680).

I can hardly express the pleasure this play gives me. That an 83-year-old wrote it is remarkable; that anyone can write such a warm, smart, sparkling play is little short of miraculous.

It began as a film script, and I think it would be better known if it had been used as one. It would have been a sort of seventeenth-century My Dinner with Andre, with dialogue and relationships between characters as the focus.

On stage, its two acts are of drastically different lengths, and there is no dramatic climax. Reading the play this time, I felt that the second act, a dialogue between Charles and his Queen, is stronger than I previously thought. However, it doesn’t give us anything much that we didn’t know after Act I.

Beatrice Webb, reading the play while it was being written, said, “If he can bring in some sort of striking incident into the play and not limit himself to sparkling talk, it may turn out A.1.” He did not, but perhaps he felt that inserting that kind of incident would be artificial.

However, if Shaw could repair the last act of Cymbeline, I can repair at least the last moments of Good King Charles. After [The clock strikes five.], insert:

VOICE. (Offstage) Your Majesty! Your Majesty! Would it please you to come out as soon as you can? Your brother has got himself in a bit of mischief!

CHARLES. Odsfish! And I have a Council meeting. I must go, etc.

That would help.

In any case, the play is by no means a failure on stage. It is lovingly revived periodically, and in 1957 it was a surprise off-Broadway success, running for almost two years. For actors it is a delight; and it has a glow and a kindly spirit unique in Shaw’s work. “Golden” is an appropriate word.

Which is not to say that the play is all sweetness and light. There are ferocious arguments over art, religion, science, and politics; there is a fist fight; there is much discussion of the perils of being a king. Charles is thinking about his own death, which does not seem to him to be too far off.

“The world must learn from its artists,” Kneller says, “because God made the world as an artist.” Shaw wrote this play as a great artist.

“Playlet on the British Party System” (1944) is an imaginative visualization in dialogue form of the rationale of the British parliamentary system, included in Shaw’s book Everyone’s Political What’s What. At the age of 88 he could, apparently effortlessly, devise an informative, well-crafted piece like this. Remarkable.

BUOYANT BILLIONS (1946-1948 / 1948) – Shaw finished this play in his early nineties, and, remarkably, wrote three more shorts ones after it. The play is brief, the plot disconnected, the themes familiar. There are Shavian mots but they sometimes seem formulaic, for example: “I am never happy. I dont want to be happy. I want to be alive and active. Bothering about happiness is the worst unhappiness.”

“Shakes Versus Shav” (1949) – a Shaw contribution to the Malvern Festival, where many of his later plays were first performed. This is a play for puppets acting out a rivalry between Shaw and Shakespeare, including the two of them thwacking each over the head.

The little play shows Shaw’s professionalism: he knew just what was expected in a puppet play. The dignified preface includes an answer to people who feel the man from Stratford was too low-class to have written Shakespeare’s plays.

FARFETCHED FABLES (1949-1950 / 1950) has a preface that reprises Shaw’s favorite themes, including the Life Force, equality of income and talent, official lying, miracles, the Roman  Catholic and Anglican churches, Marxism, Democracy, leadership testing, education, the atomic bomb – it’s a long preface – and art:

As events as they actually occur mean no more than a passing crowd to a policeman on point duty, they must be arranged in some comprehensible order as stories.

The play itself consists of six scenes (one a long monologue), each set further in the future than the one before, none that make one want to be there. Shaw’s fecundity at the age of 93 is impressive.

“Why She Would Not” (written 1950) is the last play Shaw wrote; opinions differ on whether he completed it or not. It’s a straightforward set of five short scenes tracing the relationship of a woman who likes her well-to-do life and a man who, as he succeeds in business, changes her situation in ways she doesn’t like. Whether Shaw thought the playlet was finished or not, it could use a concluding punch at the end.

*

Most of my conclusions about Shaw’s plays are included in the survey above. The variety of settings, plots, and characters in his plays is astonishing. Critics have pointed out areas of life that he does not include; but look at how much he gets in! He is, as I said, a professional writer: he can produce a serious play, a comedy, a farce, a sketch, an occasional skit, even on demand.

Certainly not all his writing is equally successful; he lived a long time and wrote a great deal. He has many successes, and some of them are successes indeed. In particular I was surprised at my positive response to several of his later plays. I felt this reading project introduced me to gems I either was not familiar with or had underappreciated.

Obviously Shaw was not a typical commercial playwright. He wasn’t just writing plays; he was creating a theater that at that time really didn’t exist, and along those lines he intended to do what he could to improve the world through his writing. Shaw’s major themes are easy to spot, including:

·         The clash between ideals and reality, and the related conflict between what people profess to believe, and what they really believe when the chips are down.

·         The Life Force as an always-developing instrument working in human life, and the obsolescence of traditional religion, particularly Christianity and its beliefs as traditionally understood. (We should note however that Shaw’s objections to orthodox Christianity do not stop him from frequently using its language.)

·         Woman as the primary instrument of the Life Force, and their general superiority to men.

·         The importance of the superior person, the Superman. (Why “man”? Why not “woman”? In his plays they are usually the ones leading the advances.)

·         The need for Socialism (noted mostly in prefaces), and the futility of Democracy in the face of the inequalities of individual ability. (This dilemma is the context of The Millionairess.)

·         The basic lack of worthiness in the professions, including medicine, law, politics, the military, and the clergy.

·         The importance of work as the supreme value in life.

Shaw isn’t a thinker with a lot of depth. After a while one notices his favorite points appearing over and over, almost reflexively, like pebbles in a pudding. I began to wish that some of these themes would not pop up so often – they seemed rote, and I began to get bored by them. 

However, it makes sense to me that Shaw’s themes might be themes of interest to a writer of comedy, as Shaw unquestionably was. For instance:

·         Comedy is always about the clash between the ideal and the real. “Take my wife – please!” contrasts the ideal of marriage and its reality. And so on.

·         Comedy thrives on energy – a slow comedy is probably not a comedy at all – so life could easily be conceived of as the Life Force by a comedian.

·         Comedy is usually about sexual relations. Ralph Cramden’s wife Alice on The Honeymooners (U.S. television sitcom, 1951-55) could be a character out of a Shaw play.

·         Comedy often includes Supermen – and then typically knocks them down, as Shaw also sometimes does.

·         Comedy, in the form of satire, frequently mocks the professions; Molière in particular was a master of this.

What can we learn from Shaw’s plays today? Obviously the task is not to be like Shaw. His era and generation are gone. More to the point, few of us can match his humor, his intelligence, and his enormous curiosity about everything in life.

And we don’t want to emulate Shaw’s faults, not that that hasn’t been done. He is the master of special pleading, of assumptions snuck into an argument as though they were facts, of straw men, of mistaken and misapplied “factual evidence.” He uncritically accepts the obsolete and misleading “facts” Marx embodies in Capital (1867); his Bible scholarship is shaky. His admiration for dictators, his naivety about Stalin and the USSR, and his growing enthusiasm for executions are horrifying.

Outweighing all these things is Shaw’s basically ethical viewpoint, which as Eric Bentley points out in his book Bernard Shaw is at the center of all his interests – economic, religious, and political. He does not care much how we got where we are. He is interested in where we are going, and he wants us to understand that our actions today determine what the future will be like.

Looked at from that point of view, Shaw’s plays are a continuing challenge to us to live in ways that count, to do everything we can to help the world be what it can be. Shaw uses the word “love” carefully, often redefining it as he does every other expression of the ideal. But his plays urge us, in particular, to work out the implications of the command to “love your neighbor as yourself” in the personal, but even more in the public, sphere.

[Well, that concludes Kirk Woodward’s remarks on George Bernard Shaw—at least for the time being.  As I observed in the fourth installment of this series, Kirk’s been a devoted and thoughtful fan of Shaw’s for a long time, so it wouldn’t surprise me to hear from him that he’s writing something else Shavian.  (Just a hint, Kirk: There are still the writer’s collected critical pieces on which to comment! ) 

[I know that any ROT-reader who’s followed this series will have picked up something interesting about GBS, and perhaps even something useful.   For the time being, however, ROTters who haven’t gotten enough Shaw for the moment may turn back on this blog not only to Kirk’s own past articles, but to several reports on productions of Shaw plays: “Two Shaw Plays (Shaw Festival 2006),” 25 September 2012, and “The 2006 Shaw Festival,” 8 and 11 December 2015.]