Pygmalion

It took the Group 20 Players a full act to warm up to their subject Tuesday night in their opening performance of Bernard Shaw's Pagmalion. The limited rehearsal time showed a great deal, to the point that the overlong first act seemed like just another rehearsal. Lines were missed, cues late, and the overall production seemed confused and unpolished. The saving grace of the evening was that the cast and general production improved greatly in the second act but not, alas, before some damage had been done.

Shaw's plays are studies in conciseness language, and manners. In all three of these he succeeded. Laurier Lister, director of this production, felt, however, that this was not enough, and included some extra-Shavian additions. These, unfortunately, did not come off well. It might, of course, be argued that the gods were against the players. For the first of these flairs was that of a 1928 London taxi (presumably the only one in the U. S. today). This in itself, was not a distraction, but was quite enjoyable. It did, however, create new problems--and here is where the gods came in. In its attempt to carry Eliza Doolittle across the stage, the taxi stalled and left the actors and the audience in a prolonged embarrassment that was relieved only by the emergence of two stage hands who pushed the Austin on its weary way. The actors, and especially the taxi driver, George Bishop, heroically covered up this unavoidable accident, but the outcome merely indicated a transferral of emphasis from Shaw to Wellesley. This in turn was followed by a totally extraneous pantomine in which Eliza retired for the night, to a background of American ragtime.

The other evils of the first act were also technical, and secondarily dramatic. Shaw's Pygmalion contains five short and concise acts. This structure was deemed inconvenient by the Wellesley group, and so the play was aborted into one long act and two short ones. The effect of this was to drag out the woe-filled first act to the point of boredom. The Players tried to make up for this in a superbly done second act, and thought to leave the audience with a good going-home impression with the third. A favorable word should be added, though, for the adroit and clever setting and scene changes throughout the play.

Finally one comes to the performances of the first act. Jerome Kilty, playing the central role of Henry Higgins, was required to carry most of this act on his own and unfortunately was not equal to this task. Evidently well-versed in Shakespearean acting, he attempted to perform Shaw in a Shakespearean manner. The result was a stiff, awkward, and a rather weak portrayal.

This was fortunately offset by the remarkable Doolittle family. Rosemary Harris, as Eliza, and Max Adrian, as her father, rescued the first act, and then proceeded to steal the show in the final acts.

The second act was the triumph of the evening. The scene marked Eliza's first and half-educated entrance into high society. In this Miss Harris was perfect. Her conversation and accent, a mixture of her own flower-girl experience and the teaching of Professor Higgins, carried the one-sided conversation to a hilarious and colorful climax. She was ably assisted in this by Olive Dunbar as Mrs. Eynsford Hill, and Joyce Ebert as her daughter, whose wonderful indignant facial expression added a great deal of amusement to the overall scene. Cavada Humphrey, as Higgins' mother, played the Victorian matriarch to the hilt. Higgins' colleague, Pickering, was adroitly played by Robert Blackburn.

In the third act, Eliza and her father again carried the humor and action over Kilty's blustering and often clumsy Higgins. Again the applause-getting taxi wrought near-havoc, this time with a late entrance, leaving Eliza and Freddy Eynsford Hill, adequately played by Frederic Warriner, in an overlong and embarrassing embrace.

Hopefully, the complaints expressed above--technical disorders, late cues, misspoken lines, and clumsy gestures--will be cleared up in subsequent performances. Evidently most of rehearsal time was spent on mastering of the English accents, which were indeed mastered. A little more time should suffice to remove the obvious mistakes, so that a viewer may consider the play itself, and then judge the merit of the director's additions, among them a conclusion taken not from the play, but from Shaw's epilogue.