Yale Bulletin and Calendar

September 20-27, 1999Volume 28, Number 5



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Staged reading of Shaw's 'Philanderer'
to include little-known fourth act

The English department will host its fourth annual staged play reading on Sunday, Sept. 26, when members of the faculty present George Bernard Shaw's "The Philanderer" -- including one act of the play unknown to most American audiences.

The performance is the third in a series of programs presented in conjunction with the special exhibition "James Tissot: Victorian Life/Modern Love," which opens Wednesday, Sept. 22, at the Yale Center for British Art (see related story). The reading will take place at 2:30 p.m. in the lecture hall of the center, 1080 Chapel St. Admission is free.

Shaw's original version of "The Philanderer," written in 1893, included one act that the playwright cut out on the advice of a friend, who thought it was inadequately connected with the rest of the play. Although the abandoned act has never been published, the original survives in the British Library, from which it has been exhumed for recent performances in England and Canada. The English department will present edited versions of the three published acts to allow time for all of the "missing" one, in what is believed to be its first public airing in the United States.

Murray Biggs, adjunct associate professor of English and theater studies, who will direct the staged reading, says that if Shaw were around today, he probably wouldn't have followed his friend's advice.

"The so-called 'missing' act was the original last act of three, and when Shaw decided to take it out, he wrote a new third act," says Biggs. "Because the abandoned third act is set a few years after the first two acts, Shaw's friend thought it should be the beginning of a new play. But nowadays -- 20 years after Shaw made the decision to cut this act out of the play -- we have different dramaturgical rules, and it doesn't seem out of place. In fact, the abandoned act actually fits in rather nicely as an Act 4."

Biggs, who has directed each of the English department's staged readings since the series began in 1996, saw a performance of the "missing" act of "The Philanderer" several years ago in Niagara-on-the-Lake in Ontario, Canada, the site of an annual Shaw festival.

"I was so fascinated by this abandoned act and realized that it was just as good as the other three," he says. "Shaw certainly didn't take it out because it was not good."

"The Philanderer" was the Irish-born dramatist's second completed work for the stage and is among those known as his "Plays Unpleasant," which focused on such unsettling social issues as slum landlordism, prostitution and -- as in "The Philanderer" --the constraints imposed on men, and especially women, by contemporary marriage and divorce laws.

Taking part in the reading will be Professors Traugott Lawler, Michael Thurston, Blakey Vermeule and Sarah Winter; Paul Fry, the William Lampson Professor of English and master of Ezra Stiles College; and David Quint, the George M. Bodman Professor of English and Comparative Literature. They will be joined by Yale senior Deanna McBeath.

For further information about special events offered in conjunction with the James Tissot exhibit, call the Yale Center for British Art events line at 432-2800.


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