Girl Gets Boy

By T.E.Kalem

MAN AND SUPERMAN by George Bernard Shaw

Intellectually speaking, G.B.S. was a great pass receiver. When astrodomed quarterbacks like Ibsen, Nietzsche, Darwin and Marx rifled ideas through the air, Shaw would snatch them and race down the field for dramatic touchdowns, spouting aphorisms and paradoxes as he went.

He probably caught his idea for Man and Superman from Schopenhauer. The glum philosopher held that "egotism is deeply rooted--but the species has a greater claim on the individual than the perishable individuality itself ... The growing inclination of two lovers is really already the will to live of the new individual which they can and desire to produce." Shaw labeled this will of the species the Life Force and gave an old formula an ingenious plot twist--boy meets girl, boy flees girl, girl gets boy. Q.E.D.: the Life Force triumphs again. To this, as a metaphysical dimension, Shaw added a third-act "Don Juan in Hell" sequence, a kind of afterworld dream in which the playwright argues that the Life Force has developed consciousness, and is using man in order to discern purpose and destiny in brute existence: "To be in hell is to drift: to be in heaven is to steer." Retorts the Devil: "On the rocks, most likely."

The revival at Manhattan's Circle in the Square theater is not exactly on the rocks, but it is certainly becalmed. One obvious flaw is the casting. Shaw's hero, Jack Tanner (George Grizzard), who doubles as Don Juan, is meant to be a clever and intense young idealist, full of revolutionary ardor. He is in the grip of what Shaw calls a "master passion," and his iconoclastic views are contrasted with those of a fossilized former liberal, Roebuck Ramsden (Richard Woods). Grizzard works hard. But he is visibly too old for the part and lacks the psychic energy needed to fuel the evangelist in Shaw's most fervent heroes.

What of Ann Whitefield (Ann Sachs), the girl to whom Jack must succumb even though he pursues his bachelor freedom across all of Europe in a touring car? She must be as delectable as strawberries and cream, a muse of delight, Goethe's "eternal feminine" luring men on. Sachs makes her predatory, poised like a pelican about to dive-bomb a poor fish. And Philip Bosco as the Devil displays an unctuous complacency that defeats the role.

If Shaw could be divided into four elements, they might be fire, music, mind and rhetoric. The fire and music are quenched in this revival; the mind and rhetoric are unquenchable, as is Shaw's master passion, his abiding love for the English tongue.

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