Word: pygmalion
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...story of Pygmalion was once that of a Greek statue that breathed. By the 20th century in My Fair Lady it became that of a woman who sang. Sam Bloomfield, director of the Leverett House production of the play that begins its run October 27, wants to restore the timeless story of the artist who chiselled away at the form of woman, only to discover he loved the substance beneath, to its Edwardian home. By presenting Shaw's play, which was first produced in London in 1913 as a reaction to Victorian morals, Bloomfield hopes to present, a picture...
...this radical notion, one may need to shift into metaphysical gear. Yet consider the vanner's relationship to the van: the true vanner has not merely romanced the motor vehicle in the traditional American way. Actually, the vanners have embraced and subjugated the homely panel truck and, with Pygmalion's zest if not his graces, have transmogrified it into something utterly new and distinct: a mobile monument to self. It is self-contained and self-containing, and its womby little room is packed with the motherly comforts of home, while its skin screams advertisements of the inhabitant...
...three of the best scenes in the Shavian canon, the play itself may be unworkable: lines by Shaw but construction by Rube Goldberg. Offstage there are battles, mob scenes and the endless clumping of Roman legions. Onstage there are only words; even in this finger exercise for Pygmalion Shaw seemed to be heading toward what he later called playwriting as a "platonic exercise...
Only in The Great Gatsby did Scott reconcile the idealism of American culture with its materialism. In these later stories, the fairytales die hard. "Jacob's Ladder," a Pygmalion story and one of the most tender in the book, tells of a rich, rather bored man who makes the sister of a murderess a film star. She offers him her affection but he rejects it until, separated by her success, he wants her; by then, of course, it is too late...
...waning of their powers made the manipulation more threatening because it was unpredictable. For much of the piece, the "hero," an Adam figure, is carried frozen about the stage. A woman, the ordering spirit of the whirling white chaos, tries to activate this statue, in a reversal of the Pygmalion-Galatea myth of artistic creation. Her attemps to infuse him with life are frustrated by the score, the other dancers, all the externals. Only in a brief moment of silence, when the score ceases to beat messages, the dancers stop gyrating, do the two find each other and come together...