Word: pygmalion
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...play Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw parodied this middle class solution. Bumbling Professor Higgins tries to turn a flower girl into a duchess and finds that she was more of a real lady than he though. In My Fair Lady, Shaw's play became the inspiration for some memorable songs. In the current Leverett House production which goes far beyond what Shaw saw as the limiting factor of class bounds. Maura Moynihan is unforgettable as an Eliza Doolittle who reveals the duchess hidden in the flower girl (and vice versa) after all. And Andrew Agush's Henry Higgins sees only that...
...Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw's bitter, biting parody of this social philanthropy, exposes its futile results. Shaw, a leading Fabian socialist of his day, believed that it was not the workers but the middle class that needed to be changed, not suddenly but through a "gradual" permeation of socialist ideas and institutions in their capitalist midsts. His dubious hero in Pygmalion is exactly the kind of man who would not be receptive to tactics such as these: a leading London phoneticist determined to translate a flower girl into a "duchess" so effectively that, he wagers, no one will be able...
Recreating Shaw's recreation of English society to the letter, the current Leverett House production of Pygmalion lends just the touch of self-irony to his characters that the members of the middle class in England so sorely lacked. By accenting those moments in the play, both humorous and poignant, when two people cannot quite connect, director Samual Bloomfield has skillfully done justice to the underlying point of Shaw. Even the beautifully painted flats of Jeff Goodman's and Cindy Ruskins's set unfold mysteriously from Covent Garden to Higgins' library to his mother's house and back and forth...
...Eliza's trial by fire, Higgins and his companion Colonel Pickering are filled with the nervous energy of expectation instead of the self-satisfied exhaustion they should be feeling after the successful ordeal they shared. But ironically even this weakness ends up working in favor of the production. This Pygmalion links its audience to the lack of connection between the classes in this age. It is as though, instead of having tried to make real contact with the poor, the actors, like the middle class philanthropists they are parodying, simply leave the money...
...Catholic Student Center LHAS Lion in Winter & Pygmalion...