Word: shavians
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...MISLED by the title of the current production at the Loeb. Too True To Be Good is no drawing room comedy, peppered with neat Shavian paradoxes and finished off with a neat Shavian conclusion. In fact, it's probably unlike any Shaw play you've ever seen. There are enough witticisms to keep the audience entertained--"I do not know how to live without my wife," says one character, "we were unhappy together for forty years"--but entertainment is not Shaw's principal concern. He denies them the familiar comfort of a traditional dramatic framework, and instead subjects them...
...WORDS, WORDS, words," one might moan, like Hamlet to Polonius, about George Bernard Shaw's Misalliance. Nearly three hours of Shavian dialogue, however diverting, is a formidable experience. That it's also a pleasant one at the Loeb is a tribute to the author and the production...
...uneventful lives of the Tarletons, a middle class family grown rich in the underwear business, whose restless daughter is engaged to a puny, spoiled aristocrat, are enlivened in Shavian fashion by the unexpected injection of foreign elements. A handsome young man and a Polish lady acrobat drop in quite literally by crashing their aeroplane into the family greenhouse. And a timid would-be gunman secrets himself in the portable Turkish bath in order to avenge his mother's honor by attacking Mr. Tarleton. The volatile Pole, Lina Szczepanowska, puts her finger on how little takes place in this English family...
Born in Zlin. Though Stoppard ravels and unravels the destinies of these characters, that is not his prime concern. Utilizing the Socratic method of perpetual questioning, he is assessing the destinies of 20th century man in a Shavian play of jousting ideas. In dramatic kinship, Jumpers is a child of Shaw's Heartbreak House. In that play, written shortly before World War I, Shaw dramatized the sundering of the social fabric of Western civilization. Stoppard is concerned with the moral fabric, the abyss of nonbelief. He sees man, devoid of metaphysical absolutes, as rending his fellow man and reducing...
Gone from the front page are the old-fogyish editorial cartoons, as well as the proclamation that this is the "American Paper for Americans." The comic strip Moon Mullins no longer adorns the first page of the sports section, and most of the Shavian experiments in phonetic spelling (frate for freight) are a thing of the past. Thanks to its flamboyant long time publisher, Colonel Robert McCormick, the Tribune's history is as colorful as that of any paper in the nation. But its raucous eccentricities have given way to a calmer tone and a less polemical approach...