The Mysterious Mr. Shaw

Resident director David Wheeler’s recent A.R.T. productions include Valparaiso, How I Learned to Drive, Nobody Dies on Friday, and Man and Superman. Mr. Wheeler has directed on Broadway, at regional theatres across the U.S. and was Artistic Director of the Theatre Company of Boston from 1963-1975. He sat down with Jennifer Roberts to discuss the challenges of directing Shaw.

Jennifer Roberts: This is your fourth Shaw at the A.R.T.. Is directing Shaw getting easier?

David Wheeler: The Doctor’s Dilemma is very hard, though it isn’t as large and challenging as Heartbreak House or Man and Superman. With the other plays you can see what you’re grappling with, but The Doctor’s Dilemma is elusive. Shaw fashioned a satire on the conspiracy of the medical profession but also invigorated an anti-romance, then subtitled the play “A Tragedy.”

JR: Did you choose The Doctor’s Dilemma ?

DW: Bob Brustein proposed it. Bob enjoyed the enduring duel between the artist and the moralist.

JR: What attracts you to Shaw?

DW: That large, complex mind never stopped challenging, speculating, proposing, and he created a huge, significant oeuvre. His plays constantly surprise, take unpredictable twists and offer sudden syllogisms. You think you have deciphered a play and bang!, he’s escaped you again.

I enjoy a little-known and intriguing fact: Shaw was a shrewd director. His language flames with wit, but in directing his plays, he went beyond the verbal sparring we celebrate. He examined gesture and body language and always assumed subtext. One has to match Shaw’s extraordinary language to rhythms that are behavioral – physical, even visceral.

Any of us who are overeducated come to appreciate the way that Shaw tries to find language that will not only describe feelings, but also protect from feelings. There’s a whole dance he does, his delight in the sensations of feeling and then his repudiation of them. That is something that we Harvardians can appreciate because we see it all over.

JR: Do you think Shaw writes this emotional elusiveness into his characters?

DW: The biographer Michael Holroyd writes of the Bernard Shaw in 1909 as a playwright “whose unconscious process filtered into the plays layers of suppressed autobiography.” One comes to appreciate the way Shaw plays with the hidden emotional lives of his characters. He delights in sensations and the dance of feelings and then enjoys their repudiation.

Shaw regularly had liaisons with women, notably actresses, but he probably also played with passions in order to write them down. A young writer, Erica Cotterill, fell in love with the 55 year old Shaw and then attacked his resistance of her feelings: “You’re a child all the while acting that you’re a man … Why do you act …what use is it – it deceives no deep parts … in all the whole stream of people that have come out of you there’s not one that moves me … – you watch and study and get behind and master things in them … and then you suddenly do a thing – you suddenly use them … consciously you’re using them to expose some evil or falsehood or whatever it’s chosen to be called … can’t you feel that everything of any kind that comes from you, work speeches, plays, letter … comes at it’s root from a pose or attitude of some kind.”

The man who talks around, above and through his emotional life is the one who is keeping it at bay. Modern psychiatrists will say, yes, the more elaborate the rational, the more completely the unconscious is subjugated, and that’s the situation of Sir Colenso Ridgeon, the leading Doctor in the play.

JR: It is obvious that Shaw’s sympathies lie with Ridgeon. How much do you think he wrote himself into this character?

DW: Start with the fact that Shaw is exactly fifty years old in 1906, and he posits Ridgeon as a man of fifty. Both Shaw and Ridgeon have enjoyed the status of bachelor, thrilled by beautiful young women. It’s obvious that Ridgeon has had success with women, but Jennifer explodes on him as others have not. She appeals to Ridgeon so deeply that he spins the roulette wheel as to whether her husband will live or die. Ridgeon, like Shaw, flirts with desire and enjoys the danger.

The artist Dubedat announces, “I am a disciple of Bernard Shaw,” but we recognize Shaw is pulling our collective leg. From the young poet Marchbanks of Candida to Dubedat, the playwright has swerved into ambivalence: the artist of The Doctor’s Dilemma doesn’t believe in morality and so gives himself absolute license to enjoy himself.

JR: Shaw doesn’t usually have death scenes in his plays, but there is quite a long death scene in The Doctor’s Dilemma.

DW: Shaw said he wrote the play in response to a challenge from the critic William Archer, who wrote that Shaw was incapable of writing a convincing death scene and that it was a limitation of his plays that they were “peopled by immortals.” So Shaw termed the play “a tragic comedy with death conducting the orchestra” and claimed he was attempting to “get a chemical combination which made the spectator laugh with one side of his mouth and cry with the other.”

JR: What do modern directors of Shaw miss?

DW: Perhaps there’s a readiness, since he’s such fun, to let it go at that. Shaw’s characters should not speak arias and witty arpeggios, but voice idiosyncratic, sharp observations and passionate arguments.

JR: What do Shaw’s plays say to modern audiences?

DW: The issues he deals with are here today. He pondered enduring questions, then wove theatrical magic around them. He was ever the Irish dreamer, but he looked squarely at money, love, marriage, and social institutions.

Two young actor/friends of mine were looking very glum emerging from the A.R.T. production of Man and Superman, and so I asked what they found displeasing. They replied, “Nothing, but that play really makes you think twice about marriage!” Now isn’t that interesting? Shaw writes this in 1903, not to be produced until 1905 and these guys in 1997 say, “What a message is contained therein!”

Jennifer Roberts is a second-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theatre Training.