All three of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival plays I’ve seen
this year (Cymbeline, Heart of Robin Hood, and now My Fair Lady) not only feature dynamic
female protagonists, but the women playing the protagonists find depth in the
most light-hearted plays and humor in the heaviest.
Everyone knows Lerner & Loewe’s musical adaptation of
Shaw’s Pygmalion. It’s standard fair
for community and high school theaters across the country, not to mention a
delightful film starring Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison. So one can imagine
how it could become over-wrought and boring. That makes it up to the artists
retelling this classic to do it in a way that makes it worth going to the
theater instead of just popping in the DVD. Rachel Warren, under the direction
of Amanda Dehnert, tells the story of Eliza Doolittle in a way that I’ve never
considered, and yet perfectly explains my single greatest problem with the
script.
Why does Eliza go back to Higgins? He’s clearly an awful,
abusive man. For years and years I thought it was just the American
happy-ending pastiche – the guy gets the girl, consequences be damned. But Warren found a part of
Eliza that I’d never seen before. The simple body gesture of flinching when
Alfred P. Doolittle (Anthony Heald) or Higgins (Jonathan Haugen) makes a sudden
movement in her direction tells a story of a girl who was beat by her alcoholic
father. Her relationship with him, being scared of him and oh so easy for him
to manipulate carries over into all her other relationships with men in the
play. This is especially true of that with Higgins, but also with Freddy (Ken
Robinson) and Pickering (David Kelly). When she leaves Higgins, she jumps right
into the arms of the first man who will have her, even though Freddy clearly
has nothing going for him – he’s spent weeks literally rolling around on the
street where she lives. Why? In the scene after the break-up in Mrs. Higgins’
house (played by Kate Mulligan) she tells Higgins that the difference between a
lady and a flower-girl is not in how she acts or speaks but in how she is
treated. She denies herself any agency, and puts it all into the hands of
Higgins who treats all women like flower-girls and Pickering who treats them
all like ladies.
So when she told Higgins goodbye forever and slammed the
door behind her, I was happy for her, like I always am. And that slamming door
was so final! Director Dehnert approached the story wanting to find the
messiness in it, and to that end put the chorus in seats on stage, let the
wires hang out, and put all her actors on stage for their warm-ups before the
show started. All of this paid off when the huge shop door up stage opened at
the end of the “good-bye forever” scene and slammed in Henry Higgins’ face. It
felt very Ibsenesque. But where the power of the slamming door in A Doll House is that that’s the end, its
power of OSF’s My Fair Lady is that
it isn’t. It’s irony that A Doll House,
by a playwright who reveled in the messiness of life, has a clean happy ending
– Nora gets agency over her own life. But My
Fair Lady, a light-hearted musical by the American fantasy-makers Lerner
& Loewe, has an untidy heart-breaking ending – Eliza is trapped in a cycle
of abusive relationships and this story will repeat itself until she’s dead or
becomes Nora Helmer.
No comments:
Post a Comment