My Stilted Lady
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
With the exception of Hamlet, who took a sabbatical from his studies in Wittenberg to kill his uncle, Eliza Doolittle may be Western theater’s most famous pupil. And her tutorial in decorum is more crowded than usual in the Roundabout Theater’s revival of the 1912 George Bernard Shaw comedy “Pygmalion,” extending to the entire company.
The unobjectionable result, directed by David Grindley, has a mothbally, duty-bound heft to it, a sort of grim-visaged doggedness that brings to mind high school assignments of the “finish Act III by Wednesday” variety. The pupils here are clearly bright, resourceful, and committed to getting a good grade. But by focusing so intently on their best behavior — or, in one prominent case, on their worst behavior — they allow Shaw’s epigrammatic wit, both stern and sparkling, to slip through their well-trained fingers.
As always, Eliza (Claire Danes) is the Cockney flower girl who first blossoms and then bristles under the stern tutelage of Henry Higgins (Jefferson Mays). A pedantic, bullying phonetics instructor with a sideline in teaching millionairesses to speak their own language properly, Higgins bets Colonel Pickering (Boyd Gaines), a fellow linguist, that he can convert this “draggle-tailed guttersnipe” into a veddy proper Englishwoman in six months.
Unlike the play’s best-known adaptations (“My Fair Lady,” of course, but also the 1938 Leslie Howard-Wendy Hiller film) or the untold numbers of homages it inspired, “Pygmalion” devotes virtually no time to this conversion. The rain in Spain stays entirely off the stage here; the only impediment to Eliza’s transformation besides the connivings of her cheerfully amoral father, Alfred Doolittle (Jay O. Sanders), is the fraught relationship between the teacher and the student, with its unbroachable differences in class.
The London-based Mr. Grindley made the most auspicious New York directing debut in years this February with his gripping revival of the 1928 warhorse “Journey’s End,” about a doomed British infantry company in the World War I trenches. The unbeatable ensemble work in that production encouraged him to bring three of his actors — Messrs. Mays and Gaines, plus Kieran Campion in the smaller role of Eliza’s doltish suitor Freddy — along with him.
As he showed in “Journey’s End,” which had perhaps the most unforgettable finale I have ever seen on Broadway, Mr. Grindley likes to give audiences something to chew on — even choke on — as they leave the theater. And “Pygmalion” has always encouraged a director’s impulse to tinker, particularly in its final moments: Shaw caught so much flak for his original ending that he wrote a 5,000-word epilogue defending the decision, then agreed to a gauzier resolution for the 1938 film. (He was credited in the film with “screenplay and dialogue,” largely as an honorific, and subsequently interpolated some of this new material into a published version.)
Without giving too much away for those whose exposure to the story is confined to these subsequent iterations, Shaw fell decidedly short of elucidating how — or even whether — Eliza and Henry part ways.
But by George, Mr. Grindley thinks he’s got it! Following in the footsteps of umpteen Shakespeare directors, he tries one of those wordless gambits that seek to maul the text while leaving no fingerprints. This newly melancholy interpretation runs completely afoul of Shaw’s printed directions, and yet it could be psychologically defensible.
Could be, that is, if Messrs. Mays and Grindley’s conception of their leading man had allowed for it. With his rouged cheeks, unruly forelock, and natty tailoring, Mr. Mays’s Higgins looks like an amalgamation of the entire Addams Family. In terms of behavior, though, young Pugsley is the primary influence. This weirdly pubescent protagonist slouches, whimpers, sulks, and stomps whenever he fails to get his way. Shaw made no secret of Higgins’s attachment to his mother (“My idea of a lovable woman is something as like you as possible”) and made it clear that he was inclined to do little with Ms. Doolittle.
But the gravitas that typically offsets these arrested qualities — a specialty of both Leslie Howard and Rex Harrison, the two most famous Higginses — is notably, provocatively AWOL. In its place is a splenetic whelp with a short fuse and a mommy complex. Perhaps in an effort to counter his bratty professor, Mr. Grindley has fallen prey to the frequent habit of defanging Colonel Pickering, Higgins’s genteel but only marginally less thoughtless co-conspirator; the poised decency that comes so naturally to Boyd Gaines actually diminishes the role slightly.
Seemingly on orders from management to spotlight his movie star, Mr. Grindley positions Ms. Danes dead center for each of the play’s five scenes. Sometimes sprawled on the ground, usually perched anxiously in a chair, this Eliza is constantly on display. This intense focus benefits neither the play nor the performer: Crumpling her upper lip at various times to convey concentration, anger, confusion, and frustration, Ms. Danes lacks the tonal versatility to rise above this static conception of the role.
The caresses of her newly posh accent sounds practiced, but then that’s appropriate given Eliza’s background. What is harder to credit is the comparable level of strain that accompanies her Cockney accent, presumably her mother tongue, at the beginning. “Respectability has broken all the spirit out of her,” the (begrudgingly) upwardly mobile Alfred Doolittle complains of his wife-to-be, Eliza’s stepmother; despite a handful of convincing moments near the end, as Eliza attains a bittersweet realization of the hurdles she still faces, a similar fate befalls Ms. Danes.
Mr. Sanders, incidentally, succumbs to this linguistic effortfulness as well, leading to an intelligent but zest-free take on this usually irresistible reprobate. Among the supporting cast, only Helen Carey and Brenda Wehle, as the two people with any control over Higgins (namely his mother and his maid), manage to make the accents feel like afterthoughts — a crucial deficiency in any “Pygmalion.”
Along with his leading men, Mr. Grindley has also carried over from “Journey’s End” a tendency to confine himself to the frontmost sliver of the stage; Jonathan Fensom’s two primary sets — Higgins’ notably gadget-free study and his mother’s tasteful sitting room — glide all the way forward from the stage’s rear corners, leaving the vast majority of the American Airlines Theatre space unused. (Only a bit of rubbish in the far left corner, an ever-present reminder of Eliza’s humbler origins, remains visible throughout.) This suited the claustrophobic trenches of “Journey’s End”; here, sadly, the denial of depth can be found not merely on the set but also among the fair ladies and gentlemen inhabiting it.
Until December 16 (227 W. 42nd St., between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, 212-719-1300).