You can learn a lot about acting Shaw from the production of “Getting Married” that opened last week at the Circle in the Square, directed by Stephen Porter. The revival (if you can call it that; the play was last done in New York in 1951) is substantially better than most of the Shaw we’ve seen at the Circle in the Square and at the Roundabout Theater in recent years, much of which, of course, Mr. Porter himself has been responsible for. Here he has assembled an ensemble cast of more than usually fine players—actors who for the most part know to avoid the traps most New York actors fall into with Shaw. Chief among these is the tendency to convert Shaw’s characters into types they were never meant to be.
Shaw’s art resided primarily in the creation of anti-types—creatures whose reasons for being is the discrepancy between what they say and what you thought they would say because of how they appear. In “Getting Married,” for example, there’s a character (played here by Victoria Tennant) who, because of her situation and the position in which society has placed her (not to mention her name, Lesbia), might be described as the very type of the maiden aunt. She doesn’t express herself like a maiden aunt, though—more like the Shavian equivalent of a marine. This interest in suggesting the eccentricity below the surface of everyday life is what made Shaw the David Lynch of his day—and what makes him ultimately vulnerable to the same charge of superficiality. That “Getting Married” proves such a delight and seems so profound is due partly to the simplicity of its design. It’s the purest possible example of the genre it represents. (Shaw subtitled it, successively, “A Conversation” and “A Disquisitory Play.”) Absolutely nothing happens in “Getting Married”; consequently, it gives one an unusually clear idea of how Shaw’s drama of ideas was supposed to work on its audience.
The setting—the anteroom of a huge country kitchen (evoked here by James Morgan)—is a place between places, a time between events: the action takes place on the morning of a day when there is supposed to be a wedding. Also present (in addition to Lesbia) are the bride’s two uncles—one of whom (Nicolas Coster) very much wants to marry Lesbia, while the other (Simon Jones) is colluding with his young wife (Madeleine Potter) to obtain a divorce so that she can marry his best friend. One uncle is a soldier and is therefore able to put forth the military viewpoint; the bride’s father (Lee Richardson), a bishop, has for some years been writing a history of marriage; the bride and the groom (Jane Fleiss and J.D. Cullum), having each, independently, called a halt to the proceedings, are locked in their separate rooms perusing pamphlets on the legal pitfalls of the married state. In other words, no character in the play has any function other than to be the mouthpiece of a particular set of ideas about marriage. This is true even of the interlopers: the philosopher-grocer (Patrick Tull) who is catering the wedding; the lawyer Soames (Walter Bobbie), who tries to draw up a contract to everyone’s liking; and the grocer’s sister-in-law, Mrs. George (Linda Thorson), who—we’re asked to believe—is also mayoress of the borough. The closest the play comes to plot developments are two relationships that eventually emerge: one between Mrs. George and the Bishop, and one between that lady and a class-conscious young man (Scott Wentworth) who has fallen flamboyantly in love with her.
The figure of the man or woman who conceives an attraction for someone outside his or her own class was the only way turn-of-the-century drama could raise the issue of sex, which is presumbaly what Mrs. George stands for. Miss Thorson, who is willowy and glamorous and speaks with an Oxbridge accent, is not quite earthy or unaffected enough to give us a sense of how the character is supposed to function in Shavian terms. (I suspect that she also represents friendship and intellectual passion.) All the same, you get an idea of how sexy the play could be from the wooing scenes between Miss Thorson and Mr. Wentworth, which leave one at times virtually gasping for breath. What Mr. Wentworth has—in company with Miss Tennant, Mr. Jones, Mr. Bobbie, and Mr. Cullum—is a stillness, an ability to do absolutely nothing with his face or voice or body that isn’t necessary, so that only the words come through. Similarly, Miss Tennant, who knows how to move like a woman who is either wearing a corset or else only a generation away from wearing one, is content to be herself, confident that the schoolmarmish way she moves her hands will contrast meaningfully with the sentiments she expresses. By contrast, Miss Potter, as Mr. Jones’s wife, is not sufficiently comfortable with her role to do it without overdoing it, and flounces and potus and simpers a good deal. Actually, Miss Potter doesn’t need to pout; her mouth forms a natural moue, so that by making funny faces she ends up looking like a stage version of the woman she wants to portray, just as the dress that Holly Hynes has designed for Miss Thorson—too bright and too coarse for the size and shape of the theatre—ends up looking like a stage version of vulgarity.
Mr. Porter, who seems to have left the cast largely to its own devices, hasn’t quite come up with a first-rate production. For that, he would have had to take more liberties with the text. The play desperatelly wants cutting; and he hasn’t found a way of dealing with some of the work’s more peculiar aspects (the way violence seems to play around the edges of the argument, for instance) or a way of making the great set-piece sequence—in which Mrs. George goes into a trance and discourses on the lot of women—seem less like a set-piece. But certainly he is to be commended for bringing together this cast, of which even those members who aren’t quite in their element are a pleasure to watch. As far as New York Shaw goes, this is as good as it gets.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, July 8, 1991