Word: staging
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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H.P.B.-as she is known to her followers-was a large and lusty adventuress who rolled her own cigarettes, gave birth to at least one illegitimate son, and stage-managed seances to "prove" her claims to supernatural powers. Granddaughter of a Russian princess, she was married off to a czarist general at the age of 16, but deserted him after three months and eventually showed up in Cairo as a psychic medium. After immigrating to the U.S. in 1874, she took up with a former Civil War staff colonel named Henry Steel Olcott, persuaded him to help her found...
...wonder whether it was accidental that the last three offerings outside the canon have been plays about religion. At any rate, Shaw was always fascinated by the religious mentality; and, although he often touched on religion elsewhere, he examined it in detail on the stage three times in his career. The first result was The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet (1909), a religious tract in the form of a romantic melodrama laid in our own Wild West. The third was Saint Joan (1923), not only Shaw's greatest play but also one of the consummate creative achievements of the twentieth...
...outset, Androcles' name in Greek-alphabet capitals hovers over the stage. A yellow scrim hangs in front, with sunflowers traced on it. As Tharon Musser's lighting changes, suggestions of a lion's head appear; and shortly some slinky jazz with a perky clarinet over a tonic-dominant ostinato ushers in the Lion (Ted Graeber) with a lioness (Jane Farnol). The two animals perform a semidance pantomime, until the Lion gets rid of his partner. Shaw's script calls for no lioness, but this seems a quite acceptable bit of directorial padding. When alone, the Lion does some pushups, indulges...
...course the verse is not sacred; what is sacred is the communication of Mayer through the text through the sound and movement on his stage to the audience watching the play. What counts here is not fidelity to convention, but rightness, and the Summer Players are, to my mind, right 99 per cent of the time. When Demetrius (Vincent Canzoneri) tossed "And, by the way, let us recount our dreams" to the audience upon exiting, an audible explosion of surprised laughter and applause arose as we realized we'd never known the line could be read like that...
Paul Schmidt (Oberon) and Maeve Kinkead (Titania) played their roles relatively straight with precision and intelligence. Which leaves Susan Channing's bi-sexual, jealous, and somewhat perturbed Puck, and if you don't know by now what watching Susan Channing on stage is like, I suggest you find out fast...