Word: pygmalion
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...told in the first person by young men who loosely share some common characteristics. An ex-college wrestler is given brief command of his squad during his own basic training and learns that trying to be fair is a kind of condescension. A sophisticated Eastern writing teacher plays Pygmalion to a gifted but corn-fed coed in Iowa. A stoic, weanling New York lawyer is gently and blessedly maneuvered into an affair with a middle-aged woman. An incipient Washington administrator's friendship with a young Soviet reveals the bureaucratic fate that awaits them both...
...theater does not survive on its masterpieces but between them. Much the same is true of Shaw. His finest works, Major Barbara, Heartbreak House and Pygmalion, are rarely performed. Conversely, scarcely a season passes when the overestimated Saint Joan and Candida do not show up on some theater's docket. One could hardly underestimate The Devil's Disciple. Shaw himself thought that this 1897 play would eventually be considered a "threadbare popular melodrama...
...career, he was a music critic signing himself Corno di Bassetto, which means basset horn. The cadences of his speeches are like arias, and Donnelly delivers them that way with an ingratiating Dublin inflection. Indeed, most of Shaw's greater plays could be transposed into operas, just as Pygmalion was made into My Fair Lady...
...PYGMALION IS A PLAY about individuals triumphing over class boundaries. The ultimate success of any production of the play depends on the actors' handling of the lead roles. Maura Moynihan's protrayal of Eliza is rich enough to do justice to Shaw's famous study of the poor flower girl. From the first moment when she pleads with passers-by in a beguiling drawl, Moynihan gives a superlative performance. Whether clothed in rags or in a silk robe, she mixes the pride and shame of a woman who knows she is a truer lady than those who only appear...
...Moynihan moves triumphantly to the door and disappears. As the lights go down on Agush, a single question is left. It is to the credit of the Leverett production of Pygmalion, and to Moynihan's performance, that we are left wondering not what Higgins believes or even what Shaw intended, but whether Eliza herself expects to come back...