Getting Married

The dedicated sect of Shavians will rush off like lemmings to see Getting Married, will I or nill I, simply because they want to know how it looks on a stage, and they may never get another chance. But less fanatic citizens are earnestly advised to stay away from this production, since the Tufts Arena Theater is not equipped to do even minimal justice to a play which is inferior Shaw at best.

As its title suggests, Getting Married is about men and women and the relations that subsist between them as such, Man and Superman and Pygmalion show what Shaw could sometimes do with this theme; here he treats it so as to expose one of his most celebrated deficiencies. I do not, like certain critics, hold a personal grudge against Shaw for not being D. H. Lawrence; but I do think it was a mistake to contrive a dramatic discussion of marriage in which the sexual urge is ignored almost as resolutely as in a Victorian novel.

Shaw never quite decided how he felt about sex. Sometimes he thought it was an overmastering impulse, expressing the determination of the Life Force to perpetuate the race. Sometimes (as in certain parts of Getting Married) it got all mixed up with romantic fantasies about "heroes! archangels! princes! sages! even fascinating rascals!"--fantasies analogous to those which, by his own testimony, occupied much of Shaw's attention during his virginal youth. The view which permeates Getting Married, however, is that sex is an undignified sort of anatomical itch, which nobody of any character would get married in order to scratch. This doctrine does not strengthen the claim of those who hold it on the interest--not to say the credulity--of an audience.

Getting Married seems to justify all the cliche derogations with which Shaw's detractors have made themselves so tiresome. The characters are hypothetical examples, points of view, types, or paradoxes, perfunctorily humanized: dry and lifeless talking automatons. And how they do talk! They do not even pause for a plot; there is nothing but bickering and quibbling and squabbling and beating around the bush all night.

This only means, of course, that Getting Married is another Shavian discussion play, cast in a form of which Shaw is an acknowledged master. But though all the Shavian turnabouts and tricks and gimmicks and gags are brought into the act, Getting Married frequently seems mechanical, clumsy, tired. Surely, for instance, nobody in the entire Shavian gallery is less gracefully created than General Boxer Bridgenorth, who smokes a pipe for a running gag, points out frequently that he is "Only a silly soldier man," and says "Dash my buttons" at intervals (sometimes, a glance at the text informs me, with one exclamation point; sometimes with two). The play is all done by formula, and yet at the same time it is formless.

So it seemed, at any rate, in Medford on Tuesday night, but it would still be interesting to see what eight or ten good character actors could make of it. The performance at Tufts has all the stigmata of bad amateurism: elaborate posturing; sporadic and phoney attempts at the proper accents; cliche characterizations; apple-cheeked students looking highly uncomfortable under assumed grey hair. The casting seems to have been done on the eenie-meenie-miney-mo system, but in spite of this and other mis- and malfeasances, the director, Marston Balch, is more to be pitied than censured. Whatever may have been his conception of the play, this motley crew is incapable of rendering it. Some, of course, are better than others, but only Frederick Blais, as an affable but reverend bishop, is anything more than tolerable.

I have been informed that important cast changes, necessitated by illness shortly before the opening, caused the performance I saw to lack the smoothness which could otherwise have been expected. But even assuming that the performance is not now as deathly tedious as it was on Tuesday night, it is hard to believe that it could have improved to a point that would justify inviting anyone to see it except the mothers of the performers.