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Jen again (still tired)
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Date Posted: 08:03:45 07/30/01 Mon
I'm not up on Shaw so I can't say for sure if there is A Shavian Way of staging things, but some aspects did irk me. The structure of the play leaves the title character as an animated rhetorical device. Barbara literally announces her changes of heart after she pops on again after a scene change, or after someone stops "making speeches" (to coin a phrase), leaving me to think, "Huh? How did that happen when I wasn't looking?" That's nothing you can blame the director or actors for, but there are some things missing that maybe they can work on - it is, after all, a 3-HOUR-long comedy. The pacing per se is quick enough that you can still make out what people say, so where's the fat to cut? Well, as I say I don't know Shaw but I know funny. (Think of Joe Bologna as the fake Sid Caesar in My Favorite Year, telling the mob boss, "In *my* business, you don't cut funny.") David Warner knows funny. I wish I weren't who I am and in the forum I'm in because it can be blown off as gushing. Really, this is my considered professional opinion that this man knows comic timing is more than pausing after a line as if to wait for a rim shot. You're up there doing things like traveling from one end of the stage to another, or entrancing or exiting, or sitting in a chair, or working with a prop. You can either do all that as if waiting for the next opportunity to say something funny or you can *be* funny doing all that. This man knows how to be funny (and true to his characterization at the same time) by merely adjusting himself in a chair while someone else is talking, without upstaging the other actor. That can only be done by someone who knows what he's doing and understands the difference between declamation and engagement (and is aided and abetted by a costumer who makes him look less like a Victorian relic and more 20th Century relic as the play progresses).
I'm not going to say only Warner does that, since the man who plays Cholly is (as a Betty-White-in-Golden-Girls type overaged ingenue) quite adept at milking his props, clothes and stage business with energy and economy - watch him hold a newspaper like a kid who can't yet read!
Where's the fat? Well, Barbara's boyfriend is showcased far more than is justified by his character, I think. He gets lots of sequences where he's isolated on one side of the stage addressing the audience while supposedly conversing with someone else, which I find unconvincing on principle. There are half a dozen instances of him doing what I can only call a melting candle wax pose, when he is yet again unabashedly overwhelmed by his infatuation. Now it does get laughs each time, but as someone who knows funny I can tell you that there's a difference between riffing and building a bit. Serious comedy repeats only to improvise or amplify. If you can't think of a way to build a bit out of the sequence you can cut most of it, leaving about five minutes you can allocate to other people (the Steven character for instance, who seems unsympathetic from the opening and stays that way). Believe me, five minutes in stage time is an eternity.
Why do a good number of the performers not really take full advantage of their stage time? Perhaps it's still early in the run? Are they that uncomfortable in period dress? Hmmm...
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