When Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen wanted to make a point about the recent upswing in HIV among reckless gay men, he turned to George Bernard Shaw.
He cited a scene from “Saint Joan,” when the Inquisitor orders the Chaplain to sit down. The Chaplain indignantly refuses, so the Inquisitor says, “If you will not sit, you must stand!” To that, the Chaplain says, ‘I will not stand!’ and flings himself into his seat.
“Often, as Shaw knew,” Cohen opined, “the best reason to do something is that someone else doesn’t want you to do it.”
Much of life’s wisdom, he wrote, can be contained in a single piece of dialogue.
Shaw has been dead 57 years, but the Irish playwright and critic remains a vast resource for life’s wisdom, common sense and rational thought. That’s why we still care about him.
Shaw gave us: “Youth is wasted on the young” … “Both optimists and pessimists contribute to society: The optimist invents the airplane, the pessimist invents the parachute.”
And my favorite (though its origin is disputed): “War does not decide who is right but who is left.”
On Thursday, the Denver Center Theatre Company opens Shaw’s “Mrs Warren’s Profession,” the 1893 tale of a prudish young woman shocked to discover her mother not only was a prostitute, she made her fortune from it. It’s a call from Shaw to “make your own circumstances.” When the play was staged in New York in 1905, the entire cast and crew were arrested for indecency.
It seems everyone who makes a life in the theater has a life that has intersected with Shaw – and an anecdote to go with it. Shaw is best known for giving the world “Pygmalion” (the precursor to “My Fair Lady”), but his 63 plays include “Arms and the Man,” “Candida” and “Major Barbara.”
Ethan McSweeny, who just directed the DCTC’s “1001,” will direct “Major Barbara” later this year for the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C. It’s a play he finds anything but a curious historical chestnut.
“I mean, thank goodness we live in times that no longer understand how the fortunes of the military industrial complex depend on man’s seemingly infinite capacity for making war,” he said, tongue firmly planted in cheek. “Thank goodness we know nothing about how a few powerful businesses can make nations wage war on their behalf – aggrandizing the fortunes of their executives regardless of the human cost.
“And thank goodness the questions of whether or not money is the root of all evil, or poverty is the only real crime against humanity, no longer have any resonance in the peaceful, egalitarian utopia in which we live.”
His favorite Shaw quote: When Undershaft says, “I am the government of your country. You will make war when it suits us and keep the peace when it doesn’t.”
“Timeless, isn’t it?” McSweeny added.
The Post asked a wide range of area actors and directors for insights into their relationships with Shaw.
Peter Anthony, who recently directed “Saint Joan” for OpenStage in Fort Collins, cited Shaw’s concern with “the forward momentum of evolution – how we progress as a species, both socially and spiritually.”
Shaw once said, “I don’t expect anybody to see as far as I do”: And because he did, Anthony said, “We still care.”
MacPherson Horle, who played Kitty in “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” for Germinal Stage Denver, was struck at the time by the “complete rift” Shaw’s words caused in audiences.
“I would always ask why someone came to a certain conclusion about a particular character, and, invariably, a personal anecdote would be thrown in,” she said. “That’s an amazing thing for a writer to do – to let the audience see themselves through the characters on stage. It’s not a neat little package, there’s no clean-cut ending, and Shaw doesn’t tell you what to think. His writing reveals us to ourselves.”
Perhaps a key to the life wisdom infused in Shaw’s work is how much of life the man saw. He lived to age 93.
Bas Bleu artistic director Wendy Ishii has many times portrayed the actress Beatrice (Mrs. Pat) Campbell in Jerome Kilty’s “Dear Liar.” That’s based on letters from a 40-year affair between Shaw and his “Mrs. Pat,” who inspired the character of Eliza Doolittle in “Pygmalion.”
Ishii called the letter Shaw wrote about his mother’s funeral and cremation “one of the most beautiful, sad, funny, honest and devastatingly moving things I have ever read.” She was struck by how Shaw juxtaposed seriousness with frivolity, making them somehow inseparable.
“I also love the gift of the word ‘belovedovedest,”‘ she said, “which is simply delightful and cracks me up.”
John Hutton’s favorite Shaw memory has nothing to do with his words. Hutton, who plays Sir George Crofts in the DCTC’s current “Mrs. Warren’s Profession,” also played Joey Percival for director Anthony Powell in the company’s aviation-oriented “Misalliance” in 1997. “We went on a flying field trip with Anthony during rehearsals,” Hutton said, “and we did a hammer roll in an open-cockpit Stearman!”
Likewise the DCTC’s Richard Sheridan Willis, who is playing Praed alongside Hutton. He once played Napoleon in “Man of Destiny” when a friend showed up to see the play – drunk.
“He didn’t want to cause a commotion leaving in the middle of the performance,” Willis said, “so he peed in his pants at his seat rather than ruin my performance.”
Jonathan Farwell, who has appeared several times opposite Ishii in “Dear Liar,” performed with the late DCTC legend Archie Smith and his wife, Katie Doubleday, in a mid-1960s production of “Heartbreak House” at the Seattle Repertory Theatre. As the octogenarian Capt. Shotover, Smith once nodded off on stage, which was understandable. Shaw has the character “sleep” for several pages before unexpectedly and vigorously chiming in, to great comic effect.
“I, young and brash, teased Archie mercilessly, and he, bless him, took it with smiling forbearance,” Farwell said. “My comeuppance came more than 20 years later, when it was my turn to play Shotover at Boston’s Huntington Theatre. I fell sound asleep in the lap of the beautiful Marilyn Caskey, and was roundly taunted by the entire cast and the director.”
Farwell said Shaw was not always kind in the challenges he presented to actors, but “the glory of his words is more than enough compensation.”
Now well into his 70s, Farwell has grown a beard to impersonate Shaw in “Dear Liar,” and he says, “I am now confronted with him every time I look in a mirror.”
“Mrs. Warren’s Profession”
Genre: Dark comedy
Presented by the Denver Center Theatre Company
Written by George Bernard Shaw
Directed by Bruce K. Sevy
Starring Jeanne Paulsen, John Hutton, James Knight and Randy Moore
At the Space Theatre, Denver Performing Arts Complex
Opens Thursday, then 6:30 p.m. Mondays-Wednesdays, 8 p.m. Thursdays-Fridays, 1:30 and 8 p.m. Saturdays through April 21
$36-$46
303-893-4100, 866-464-2626, all King Soopers or denvercenter.org; 800-641-1222 outside Denver
