The heroine of “Man and Superman,” Ann Whitefield, is one of Show’s strong-minded women. Like Candida Morell, Barbara Undershaft, and Vivie Warren, she knows the world and what she wants out of life. But Ann isn’t as immediately likable as Candida, Barbara, and Vivie; she lacks their forthrightness and their gift for argument. Where Barbara and Candida can hold their own with fathers, suitors, and husbands, Ann comments on speech instead of engaging in it, and she manages people—particularly men—instead of trying to reason with them. She’s forever getting caught out in some manipulative lie—usually by Jack Tanner, the self-styled radical who seems so anxious to escape her machinations. It’s an undignified position for a young woman to put herself in, and one can easily see that Ann Whitefield might offend modern female sensibilities—especially since Jack’s main attraction for Ann seems to lie in the regularity with which he insults and abuses her.
“Man and Superman” is Shaw’s great treatise on sex, morality, and the war between men and women. Written between 1901 and 1903, it was both his answer to the conventional romantic comedy and a response to the joking suggestion, made some years earlier by the London Times critic Arthur Bingham Walkley, that he attempt a play about Don Juan. Shaw’s modern “Libertine” is a man who runs from Woman instead of pursuing her and who outrages not her person or her honor but the tenets of conventional morality. Shaw referred to the long dream sequence in Act III, in which Tanner falls asleep and imagines a conversation, in Hell, between the Devil and the characters in Mozart’s opera, as a “pleasantry” and “a totally extraneous act.” But the play is full of lines that look yearningly forward—or hauntingly back—to the dream sequence: “Octavius, it’s the common lot. We must all face it some day,” “A lifetime of happiness! It would be hell on earth,” “I’ll call you after your famous ancestor Don Juan,” “That’s the devilish side of a woman’s fascination,” “When you go to heaven, Ann…” And, finally, in Act IV, Tanner’s “When did all this happen to me before? Are we two dreaming?” Whatever Shaw thought (or said he thought), “Don Juan in Hell” contains the key both to Tanner’s essential character as an idealist and to the nature of his attraction for women.
The latest revival of “Man and Superman,” at the Roundabout Theater, does not include “Don Juan in Hell.” Instead, the production (which excises Act III entirely and renumbers Act IV as Act III) teases the audience with snippets of Mozart. (In Act II, Tanner’s chauffeur, Henry Straker, keeps whistling the opening bars of “La ci darem la mano,” from “Don Giovanni.”) The revival is standard Roundabout Theater fare: it contains execrable performances by David Birney and Frances Conroy as Jack Tanner and Ann Whitefield and glorious performance in nearly all the secondary roles—Straker (Anthony Fusco), Tavy (Michael Cumpsty), the American Hector Malone (Jonathan Walker), his father (John Carpenter). Kim Hunter proves a charming Mrs. Whitefield once she gets going, and of the supporting parts only Tavy’s sister Violet is overplayed (by Harriet Harris).
It’s typical of New York Shaw that secondary roles are played to perfection and leading roles to no purpose whatever. In recent seasons, what might have been first-rate productions of “Arms and the Man,” “Mrs. Warren’s Profession,” and “You Never Can Tell” were marred by the performances of such leading ladies as Glenne Headly, Uta Hagen, and Amanda Plummer. (The Pearl Theatre Company’s recent revival of “Candida” was an exception, held together as it was by Rose Stockton’s performance in the title role.) What’s unusual about the production at the Roundabout is the degree of difference between the levels of performance: Mr. Cumpsty and Mr. Fusco are so deft, Mr. Birney and Miss Conroy so inept that the credit for good performances must clearly go to the actors rather than to their director, William Woodman. Mr. Birney’s characterization is lodged entirely in the sort of mannerisms that Shaw worked so hard to abolish from the nineteenth-century stage: in putting his hands in his waistcoat pockets, brushing his forehead, and striking attractive poses against convenient pieces of furniture.
Miss Conroy’s performance, meanwhile, seems motivated wholly by dislike for the character she is playing. She blinks a lot and speaks in a peculiar, repressed fashion (as though her jaws had been wired together) to show what a hypocrite Ann is, and emphasizes Ann’s coquetry by reacting to everything onstage with an affected little moue. She fixes her hair when Tanner’s hack is turned. Her portrayal is openly hostile, as though she were anxious to divorce herself from the low, scheming creature that Jack divines Ann (and, by extension, all women) to be. I sympathize with Miss Conroy—I’m not wild about Ann Whitefield myself—but her performance seems dictated by an inability to take in the shape of the play. Even without the “Don Juan in Hell” sequence, “Man and Superman” takes us far beyond Jack Tanner’s inadequate views of “the struggle between the artist man and the mother woman.” It is Ann, after all, who proves to have the clearer vision. Tanner, for all his intellectual chatter, is a fool. Shaw was, in his way (as Eric Bentley has repeatedly observed), as subversive as Ibsen and, later Strindberg when it came to recognizing women’s sexuality. The whole point of “Man and Superman” is the role reversal in the courting game: here woman is the pursuer, not (as Jack thinks) because she is basically predatory, but because there is something she wants. More transgressive than any of Jack’s verbal flying in the face of convention is the governing idea behind the play’s dramatic situation: that the man a woman wants to marry is not the one who idealizes her but the one who knows how rotten she can be. What distinguishes Tanner from the crowd of other speechifying Shavian heroes is the pleasure—almost erotic in its intensity—with which we look forward to the moment when he will stop talking.
It’s not impossible to play a character one doesn’t have much sympathy with. Rose Stockton, in the circular issued by the Pearl Theatre Company, stated her basic discomfort with some views about women that Shaw espoused, but that discomfort was not discernible in her portrayal of Candida Morell. Similarly, though Michael Cumpsty is clearly aware that Tavy is there to parody conventional idealism, the knowledge doesn’t prevent him from making us care about Tavy. Perhaps in some future dream sequence there will be a meeting place imagined for the Rose Stocktons, the Michael Cumpstys, and the Anthony Fuscos of this world, where, without the distracting influence of commercially minded producers and casting directors, they can all come together and perform Shaw.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, August 8, 1988