Word: hypatia
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Naturally, the sounds of an upstaged plot line can scarcely be heard in this debater's Valhalla. Tarleton's daughter Hypatia (Jeanne Ruskin) is engaged to a simp named Bentley Summerhays (Keith McDermott), but she is restive and parched for adventure-which drops out of the sky when an airplane crashes into the greenhouse...
...acrobat Lina Szczepanowska (Patricia Elliott), Shaw's totally liberated New Woman. The third unexpected guest comes wielding a revolver. Gunner (Anthony Heald) proves to be Tarleton's illegitimate son, bent on revenge. This gives Shaw a chance to play the dialectical game of cat-and-mouse. Inevitably, Hypatia gets the aviator to chase her till she catches him. "Papa, buy the brute for me," she purrs to Tarleton. Papa does...
Tarleton's daughter Hypatia (Deborah Kipp) is so restless under the inane constraints imposed on a gentlewoman that she has become engaged to a man who is a shrill teakettle of immaturity. When a handsome aviator (Geraint-Wyn Davies) and his Polish acrobat passenger (Carole Shelley) enter the Tarleton drawing room after their plane crashes into the greenhouse, verbal gunfire begins to crackle all along Shaw's battlefront...
This is an uneven production. The high spot is Webster's Tarleton, a figure of dynamic animal magnetism and a dauntless fox hunter of ideas. Drawn to the aviator, Kipp's Hypatia is more coquette than carnivore in her pursuit.While the clever flow of the Shavian line defies damming. Director Christopher Newton permits intellectual comedy to be diverted into farce. No matter how funny Shaw may be, his truest punch line is moral passion. - T.E.K