G.B.S. Lives

By T.E.K.

MY ASTONISHING SELF as devised by Michael Voysey from the writings of G.B.S.

Bernard Shaw put on a one-man show from the moment he cut his teeth on words. His bloodstream was ink, but, body and soul, he was mind.

Impish, irate, iconoclastic, that mind was robustly playful and evangelically fervent. Irish Actor Donal Donnelly has immersed himself in these characteristics of Shaw's mind, and that is one reason why his portrait of G.B.S., now off-Broadway at the Astor Place Theater, is as persuasive as it is irresistible.

The musicality of Shaw's language pervades the evening. His mother had a fine mezzo-soprano voice, and at the beginning of his journalistic career, he was a music critic signing himself Corno di Bassetto, which means basset horn. The cadences of his speeches are like arias, and Donnelly delivers them that way with an ingratiating Dublin inflection. Indeed, most of Shaw's greater plays could be transposed into operas, just as Pygmalion was made into My Fair Lady.

Refreshingly, Michael Voysey, who put together this program of Shaviana, has stayed away from the plays altogether. The selections are drawn from letters, essays, critiques and talks on the BBC, plus a frail, touching, ninetyish farewell to all on British TV. The evening moves chronologically from Shaw's arrival in London and includes reminiscences of his early family life, his courtship of Charlotte Payne-Townshend, a millionairess, his epistolary romancing of Ellen Terry, the famed actress, and his meeting with Isadora Duncan at which, to his acute distress, she propositioned him.

The evening is richest when Shaw tilts a lance in defense of a cause or breaks it over the head of a foe. Doctors and their medical pretensions are greedy frauds to Shaw, and he skewers them with paradox and irony. As a vegetarian, he amusingly pictures his funeral procession with his casket followed by the herds of cows, pigs and fowl that he has spared, all in white ties. He eulogizes Christ as a nonconformist and identifies with St. Joan as an "insufferable" know-it-all.

The man's ardor, his passion, his kindness, his wit, the juices of his undammed Life Force flow through Donnelly's performance. Donnelly captures the nuances of the aging process, the time when the patriarchal beard seems to wag the man. Yet throughout, the actor maintains a conversational urbanity that makes the show a fit companion for two of Shaw's pet abominations, brandy and cigars.

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