Getting Married
Northlight Theatre
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Two current productions focus on Shaw the wordsmith. Eschewing all but bare-bones setting and costume, Getting Married and Don Juan in Hell are both played as readers theater, with actors using scripts as they speak their dialogue from music stands. The lack of visual distraction doesn’t seem to bother the audiences a whit; finely crafted wordplay is as inherently theatrical as elaborate stagecraft. But the two shows reflect very different attitudes about performing Shaw: Getting Married, an imperfect but interesting piece, is treated with close, pleasurable attention to the quality of the text, while Don Juan in Hell, a great script, is wrecked with stupid shtick and nightclub vulgarity.
Written between 1900 and 1903 as a dream sequence in the four-act Man and Superman and first performed as a separate work in 1907, Don Juan in Hell reworks the legend of the Spanish aristocrat who’s sent to hell after seducing a young noblewoman and killing her father in a duel. From the start Shaw turns the tale on its head: his Juan is no libidinous libertine, but an aloof intellectual torn between his fascination with the world and his desire to remain detached from it. Don Juan is, of course, the sexually shy Shaw, whose erotic ambivalence informs so many of his protagonists.
