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P11hlic Perspective is the Pittsh11rgh P11hlicTheater's newsletter tors11hscrihers and friends, p11hlishedperiodically thro11gho11t the season. lisalliance: Sparkling And Contrary Misalliance is now considered one of the most delightful plays in the Shavian canon; however it was not always so popular. Severely denounced by the London critics when it first appeared in 1910, Misalliance vanished after only three performances. The New York premiere in 1917 also received unenthusiastic notices: The New Republic said, "Mr. Shaw shrinks several sizes in the estimate of a normally patient man." It wasn't until 1953 that the play began to catch on. The successful revival at the City Center in New York under the direction of Cyril Ritchard led New York Herald Tribune critic Brooks Atkinson to remark that "Shaw's Misalliance may be graded upward." He went on to call the play "sparkling and contrary in the best Shavian style." In The New York Times, Walter Kerr called Misalliance "the funniest subjectless play I have ever seen." When the National Tour of this production came to Pittsburgh in October 1953, it played at the Nixon Theatre. The Pittsburgh Press's Kaspar Monahan called the play "one of the most hilarious farces in centuries of playwrighting," and was puzzled by the chilly reception the play originally had received. He called the London critics "old-womanish scribblers." Perhaps the truth of the matter is
that Misalliance was so far ahead of its time that it took until 1953 for audiences to catch up with it. Certainly few plays can match its record of receiving one major New York revival each decade since that 1953 production. In 1961 at the Sheridan Square Playhouse, Misalliance was directed by Philip Minor who was praised for his "astute direction" of "a sprightly and stylish conversation piece." The New York Post critic Jerry Tai mer called the 1972 revival of Misalliance "delightful Shaw which means topdrawer in any theater." Reviewing the play again in 1981, Walter Kerr said: "The cross pollination, the gleeful leap from topic to topic and impertinence to impertinence, keep the whole business bouyant, impishly and nervelessly defying all the dusty known rules for survival on a playhouse stage." The Dallas Times Herald critic described the current Dallas Theater Center production directed by Philip Minor like this: "What a smart, crackling, playful production! Don't wait for me to qualify this rave, because I'm not going to." As Kaspar Monahan said back in 1953: "Once again the Old Boy of English Letters demonstrates that a great writer's works never grow old." Stephen Berwind
Ford Rainey and Stephanie Dunnam play John Tarleton and his daughter, Hypatia, in the Public Theater's Misalliance.
George Bernard Shaw, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1925, as he neared ninety.
George Bernard Shaw: Man of Ideas Hating the name of George, Shaw was called Sonny by his family, Bernard by his friends, G.B.S. by himself, and names unprintable by countless victims of his pointed wit. That wit, which became his trademark and which brought him fame and fortune, was an expression of sadness as much as anger - the sadness of someone who is disillusioned with both his own and mankind's failure to live up to a certain potential. George Bernard Shaw grew up in a curious home environment - which he later described as loveless and joyless - consisting of a drunken father, who gave him his strong sense of humor and a fondness for deflating sacred cows; an embittered mother, who gave him his rich background in music; and George Vandaleur Lee, his mother's singing teacher, who lived with and helped to support the family. When Lee left for the richer rewards of London, Mrs. Shaw followed, and the financial pinch forced Shaw to leave school and take a job as a clerk at a Dublin real estate office. The job bored him and Dublin bored him, and he was convinced that he could never fulfill his destiny of greatness in such a small pond. Thus, in 1876, at the age of twenty, Shaw set out for London. During his early London years, Shaw lived off his mother, read voraciously at the British Museum, joined countless literary and debating societies (to cure
himself of his Irish brogue and his almost pathological shyness) and wrote. Between 1879 and 1883 he wrote five novels, all enjoyable, but none of which was accepted for publication. Nonetheless, the experience was invaluable. During the same period Shaw. came to know most of the leading young British socialists and joined the newly formed Fabian Society. In the bourgeois Marxism of the Fabians Shaw found a cause to which he could dedicate his talents; for forty years, as an essayist and debater, preacher and clown, he was the chief architect and spokesman for the Fabian program to make England a socialist parliamentary state. But political action, however intense, provided an outlet for only part of Shaw's incredible energy. Having failed as a novelist, he turned to journalism, and over a period of fifteen years was art critic, music critic, book reviewer and drama critic for a variety of London papers and magazines. The music criticism may well be the wittiest ever written, and it gave Shaw his first taste of notoriety, but it was through drama criticism that he found his true career. In 1892 an ambitious theatrical entrepreneur named J:T. Grein complained to Shaw, who wa-s"lne most adventurous of the London critics, that his two-year effort to bring the plays of Ibsen, StrindContinued on Page 2