TWO BY SHAW, Writer’s Theatre Chicago, at Books on Vernon. Writer’s Theatre Chicago’s last production was a literate, compelling, if a bit histrionic play based on the life of the literate, compelling, histrionic poet, Anne Sexton. This time around, as if to prove they can also perform cooler, more comic, but no less literate material, the folks at Writer’s Theatre bring us two one acts by George Bernard Shaw, one written near the end of his writing life, the other near the beginning.
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Perversely, they begin with the older and better of the two, a taunt two person one act, “The Village Wooing,” in which an Oxford educated writer is pursued by a shopgirl. In true Shaw fashion, it becomes clear that its white-collar writer not the shopgirl who would be improved by such a marriage. It turns out the life of shopkeeping in a village more challenging and fulfilling than the hack’s so-called life of the mind. The play brims with Shavian wit most of which survives performances that begin stiffly enough with forced sub- Masterpiece Theater accents and but which, as the play progresses, settle into a warm, likeable competence. Though Adrianne Cury and Charles Pecor never develop the kind of chemistry that makes their pairing seem inevitable or even believable, they do manage to keep Shaw’s comedy funny and don’t stumble when Shaw artfully reveals near the end of the play the beating hearts beneath his comic figures.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Alexander Guezentsvey.
