Pygmalion

I thoroughly enjoyed Shaw's Pygmalion today. I must say that I had my doubts after a couple of Gawkers trashed it. I thought they were criticizing Claire Danes's acting ability. But having now seen the Roundabout Theater Company's production I realize that they simply don't know much about Edwardian London, England's class system, and the vast disparity between the rich and the poor at the time. Danes did a fine job, and the interplay between her and Jefferson Mays was superb. (If I may trash the Gawkers for a moment, I don't think they can get over the star of "My So-Called Life" doing a fine job in a great role in one of the twenteith century's great plays.)

I read the play so long ago (college) that I wanted to reread it--also I had never seen it before. But I ended up being too busy cramming for my German exam (I'm flying to Europe on Thursday, and I am going to Germany for the first time).

What struck me about Pygmalion today was, first, that Prof. Higgins has Asperger's syndrome. Hans Asperger described the syndrome in 1944, but Shaw put it up on stage 30 years earlier. Just skimming through the Wikipedia entry on AS one finds phrases such as "characterized by difficulties in social interaction," "Abnormalities include verbosity; abrupt transitions; literal interpretations and miscomprehension of nuance," "show a theoretical understanding of other people’s emotions; however, they typically have difficulty acting on this knowledge in fluid real-life situations," "Individuals with AS may collect volumes of detailed information on a relatively narrow topic," and so on.

I had always thought of this as Liza Doolittle's play, but I don't now. I see Henry Higgins in his parallel Asperger universe--he holds his own, but he does so in his world. At the end of the play he is convinced that it would be a great idea if Liza Doolittle joined him and Colonel Pickering and they lived as three bachelors. If only Liza has Asperger's as well, she probably would have agreed--but then the play would have lost a major dimension of its conflict. I'm not saying it's a story of a man with Asperger's; I'm saying the conflict arises from two universes that cannot intersect--and disparate universes that can (I'm thinking of the themes of wealth and class, which Shaw disaggregates). Shaw apparently wrote an essay explaining why Liza does not marry Prof. Higgins; however, I have not read it. By the way, the funny scenes in this play are really funny.

The second thing I noticed is how Existential this play is--chiefly at the instigation of Prof. Higgins, who is surrounded by non-Existentialists. I have read more Sartre, Camus, and Beckett since I graduated from college--and if I hadn't, I don't know that I would have recognized this strain in the play, including how it informs the social commentary that runs through the work, which on the surface is quite slapstick and layers below pertains to the core of what it means to be a human being. Shaw has become a much better playwright since I first read him in college.