Word: shaw
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...work begins when Mrs. Campbell was at the peak of her career and Shaw a merely notorious pamphleteer. Act I contains the story of Shaw's plea to Mrs. Campbell to take the role of Liza in Pygmalion, her frightful automobile accident (which she thought had ended her career), and the final triumph of the opening night. In this act, Kilty turned his play into a play about a play and slipped in and out of actual rehearsals of scenes from Pygmalion...
Similarly in Act II, Kilty slips in and out of the glorious interlude in The Apple Cart, in which Shaw intended King Magnus to be the author and Orinthia to be Mrs. Campbell--two portraits in disguise. This act too presents the long quarrel between the two over what should be done with their letters and over how much of them ought to be published. The act moves on to a most affecting conclusion, as we see the pathetic decline and hard days of Mrs. Campbell, who finally has to overcome her pride and write to Shaw for assistance...
...Shaw's proverbial wit is abundantly manifest. At one point the self-styled "greatest living master of letters" exclaims, "All I ask is to have my own way in everything." And after an ovation at a play, he said, "My impulse was to rise and bless them. I often feel like the Pope...
Kilty himself played Shaw, and Cavada Humphrey (who recently became Mrs. Kilty) the actress--both forceful and faultless performances, carefully staged with appropriate lighting and background music. The whole show pointed up the gravity of the theatre's loss between 1940 and 1950 of these letter-writers, two great hearts and grand souls...
What if the average person were to live 300 years? Or 3000? Well, this is the problem examined by Bernard Shaw in his Back to Methuselah. This play is getting its first American production since the 1922 world premiere in New York. It is especially welcome and timely in view of Wellesley's current presentation of Man and Superman. For Shaw wrote Methuselah in 1921 as a companion sequel to his Superman of 1903. In the earlier play Shaw argued his thesis, taken from Schopenhauer, that woman is the pursuer rather than the pursued; and his ideas, taken from Bergson...