Penny Hauffe, Craig Snyder, and Phil Erickson shine as Eliza Doolittle, Colonel Pickering, and Henry Higgins. (Photo by Jim Poston.)
To prepare myself for Run Rabbit Run Theater’s production of Pygmalion, I added “My Fair Lady,” the Hollywood musical version of the play, to my Netflix queue, but it didn’t come in time, and now I think that’s just as well, because the experience I had at Grandale Farm on Saturday night was the antithesis of a Netflix encounter. That’s thanks to Meredith Bean McMath, who has conceived and orchestrated an event that harkens back to theater’s roots, which have nothing to do with asking a computer to send you a disk in the mail. McMath has excellent collaborators–playwright George Bernard Shaw, Chef Author Clark, and nine people who are so good at pretending to be other people that you wonder whose voices they hear when they talk to themselves–but the vision that brought these forces together is McMath’s.
I say harkening back to theater’s roots for two reasons. First, because I think theater is supposed to speak to fundamental questions, like ‘What are we doing here?‘ Both here, at Grandale Farm or any other venue, and Here. A good production should answer the first question decisively while holding the second question up for my consideration without pretending to answer it. McMath and Shaw take care of that.
“I admire Shaw for his wit and storytelling ability,” McMath told me–which means that his play isn’t somber–“but I love him for his honest depiction of human foibles.” Which means that it isn’t frivolous either. Any time we’re honest with ourselves about how people act and what they are, we’re considering that question: what are we doing Here?
In his preface to the play, Shaw says that what he’s doing here is trying to improve his country: “The English have no respect for their language,” he says. “They spell it so abominably that no man can teach himself what it sounds like. It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him….The reformer England needs today is an energetic phonetic enthusiast: that’s why I have made such a one the hero of a popular play.”
Eliza frowns before learning the language of Shakespeare and Milton. (Photo by Jim Poston.)
But the title of the play, Pygmalion, suggests that he’s interested in more than vowels and consonants. Pygmalion refers to a Greek myth about a disillusioned sculptor who, according to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, was “offended by the failings that nature gave the female heart, [so] he lived as a bachelor, without a wife or partner for his bed.” A lonely man, in other words, with time on his hands. To pass the time, and change the way he thinks about the world, Pygmalion carves a perfect woman, out of ivory, investing in her all his skill, and all the care that he’s afraid to give a living woman. And at length he falls in love with his creation.
“[He} speaks to it; and holds it, and imagines that his fingers press into the limbs, and is afraid lest bruises appear from the pressure.... He arranges the statue on a bed on which cloths dyed with Tyrian murex are spread, and calls it his bedfellow, and rests its neck against soft down, as if it could feel.”
Phonetic enthusiast Henry Higgins, the reformer England needs today, transforms a cockney flower girl, who “has English that will keep her in the gutter for the rest of her days,” into a lady who speaks the language of Shakespeare and Milton. He doesn’t have the nerve to call her his bedfellow (she’d slap him if he did), and he would probably tell his buddy Colonel Pickering that bedfellowing is the consolation of the inarticulate classes, but otherwise Pygmalion is pretty much the story of Pygmalion. Phonetic reform is a pretense--one that turns language into a playground.
But wait: the second reason I say harkening back to theater’s roots is that in Shakespeare’s day, and maybe in Shaw’s, people went to the theater to look at each other as much as to watch the show, and that’s how this event begins: the hostess escorts you and your wife to a table where four other couples are already sitting, and you get a glass of wine and you slide that little plate of cranberries and cheese a little closer to your water glass, and you settle in to eavesdrop on your table-mates, trying to figure out which ones you’ve seen somewhere before and whether you liked them. It’s exciting to discuss their clothing with your wife in tones that make it sound like you’re critiquing the wine or the china. And, honestly, the woman right across from me was wearing the sort of snowflake pattern sweater I haven’t seen in public since I left Minneapolis, where all the women wear them when they bring a casserole to potluck supper in the basement of the church. “Ask her where she’s from,” I urged my wife. “I bet she says Minnesoootah!”
Grandale Farm might not seem like a logical venue for dinner theater because it’s not strategically placed to draw a crowd, and the facility is simple, just an auxiliary dining room next door to the Grandale Farm Restaurant. But the place has two important attractions: Author Clark and his sous chef, Enrique Jaciento. Those men serve some of the most compelling food I’ve ever eaten. The regular menu at the restaurant includes appetizers, entrees, and deserts that mystify me. Who would think of pouring creamy cider dressing on a sauteed pear? Or mixing risotto with rhubarb and serving it next to a lamb chop? Or making strudel out of parsnips, or gnocchi out of asparagus?
A self-serve buffet for sixty people has to be a little plainer, but even “plain food” designed by men as talented as Clark and Jaciento makes me think that I should find a different name for what I normally consume to slake my hunger. We liked the combination of warmth from the cumin and bitterness from the watercress in the watercress-cumin-feta salad, and we liked the flounder, which was stuffed with lemongrass polenta rather that something rich like crab meat. I ate three.
The performance space is thirty feet long and forty feet wide, with two buffets and six big tables in it. The stage, which is a platform barely big enough to hold a sofa, gets about as much space as one of the tables. When the play begins, and all the patrons turn their attention from the people at their tables to the people in the corner who are standing up and talking louder than the rest of us, in funny accents, and wearing more interesting clothes, it feels a little like switching from the private pleasure of pretending not to listen to another couple’s conversation to the public pleasure of collective eavesdropping.
In this sense, too, the production harkens back to theater’s roots: the whole show is the voices and the faces of these people, and the things they say to each other, offered up so matter-of-factly that it wouldn’t surprise you for one of the actors to take a seat at your table.
“Directing at Grandale changes the nature of the relationship between actors and audience,” McMath said. She likens working on such a small stage to writing a sonnet: “[it’s] an opportunity to create very tight, very fresh work within given boundaries. Suddenly facial expressions, looks and gestures become more important.”
It does in fact appear that the actors have transposed their lexicon of motions from the large canvas of a conventional stage to the small canvas of their stationary bodies. Phil Erickson, who plays Henry Higgins, often leans backward from the waist to put some space between himself and people saying things he finds appalling, of whom there are many. Conversely, he will sometimes pucker his mouth at people, as if the forward motion of his lips might be enough push someone away in those cramped quarters.
Penny Hauffe, who plays Eliza Doolittle, also works her face as if it were the only space available for motion. When her feelings are hurt, she pinches her eyes tightly, making more room for her mouth to open wide, and when she’s taken aback by a comment that might otherwise make her move away from the speaker, she tucks her lower lip into her mouth, as if to protect at least some part of herself from the vagaries of life.
Pictured L to R: Amy Blair as Clara Eynsford-Hill, Sue Derrow and Mrs. Eynsford-Hill, Penny Hauffe as Eliza Doolittle, Garrett Milich as Freddy Eysnford-Hill, Karlah Hamilton as Mrs. Higgins and Craig Snyder as Colonel Pickering. (Photo by Jim Poston.)
In fact, all of the actors speak with their faces. Karlah Hamilton’s Mrs. Higgins cocks an eyebrow so high that it nearly crosses her hairline while simultaneously dropping her jaw and pulling back her chin to create the kind of gap you see in cartoons, the great downward curve of her lips repeating the arch of her brow. Garrett Milich, who speaks only a couple of lines, has learned to make his face suggest that thoughts or feelings are struggling within him which he hasn’t yet found words to release, and thus he steals every scene he’s in without opening his mouth. And Craig Snyder as Colonel Pickering works his face so hard that sometimes he seems to be suffering, or trying to send messages in silence.
These craftsmen say so much in silence that you have to wonder if they mean to undermine the notion that our language defines us and determines our fate, which is the superficial premise of the play.
But the language they speak is a greater triumph of craft than the things that they say with their faces. I should say the languages they speak, for each character speaks something like a dialect of his own. Eliza never aspirates an ‘h’ or pronounces a ‘t’ unless it starts a word. Eliza’s father stretches his vowels into the spaces consonants normally occupy, whereas Henry’s vowels sound pinched. He pushes them through tight lips to make a tone that’s high and tense, like the sound of a ukelele. Each of the other actors has a tone of his own, which Henry can trace to a region of England or a neighborhood of London as accurately as my wife can trace an accent to Charleston, or Memphis, or Yazoo City, and the fact that all those different accents share that tiny stage for two hours without corrupting each other is further testimony to the talent of these actors–and to Karlah Hamilton’s coaching.
That precision takes a lot of work. “To get where I want to go with a show, my goal is 24 three-hour rehearsals,” McMath said. “In Loudoun, this is ever and always a challenge! It never ceases to amaze me how much work people are willing to do, but…that’s passion for you.” Penny Hauffe has such passion that she mastered two different accents for this show, the gutter English that she practically sings in the first half of the play, and the aristocratic English she’s forced to intone in the second half.
“You have no idea how much work it is to take a living human being and change her into another by changing her language,” Henry tells his mother. “You change a person with her language.”
And Eliza is in fact changed by Act Four: in a long peach gown she is no longer herself: she stands silent with her back to the men, listening but not talking, even with her face.
“I’ve forgotten my language and can only speak yours,” she says later. “What’s to become of me now that I’m not me anymore?”
“You two are a pretty pair of babies,” Mrs. Higgins says to Henry and Pickering, “playing with your living doll!”
Here the play diverges from the myth. Ovid’s Pygmalion wants to be in love, so he gathers the courage to go to the temple of Venus and offer a prayer: “‘If you can grant all things, you gods, I wish as a bride to have…’ and not daring to say ‘the girl of ivory’ he said ‘one like my ivory girl.’ …When he returned, he sought out the image of his girl, and leaning over the couch, kissed her. She felt warm…. The lover is stupefied, and joyful, but, uncertain and afraid he is wrong, he reaffirms the fulfilment of his wishes, with his hand, again, and again.”
Henry Higgins stops at stupefied, uncertain, and afraid he is wrong. He doesn’t get to joyful, or to kissing, because the language he speaks, the language he imposes on Eliza, the language Shaw pretends he wants his countrymen to use, is too refined and self-assured to talk about a world where changes can be made by forces out of our control. One of the play’s ironies is that those changes occur in Henry as surely as they occur in Eliza, but she can see them. He cannot.
The cast of Pygmalion surrounds director Meredith McMath.
“If the play makes the public aware that there are such people as phoneticians,” Shaw writes in his preface, “and that they are among the most important people in England at present, it will serve its turn.”
But if that’s really what the play’s about, why call it Pygmalion, you wonder.
And then you remember that Henry Higgins, the phonetician, warns us about Shaw’s use of language: “Do you want me to say what I really think?” Higgins asks. “What people really think would break up the whole show.”
McMath understands that. When I congratulated her on my way out the door, she smiled slyly and said, “See how much fun I get to have?”
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