Audiences might not realize that our theatre program is not about providing entertainment for the college -- although it does that. It's about training our students in the crafts and skills of theatre. It's about education both of Creative Arts students and the college as a whole. Ricciardi's Pygmalion did just that.
The 2 hour + performance sped by, carried along by the sense of the students "getting it right," the beauty of the costumes and lighting, and the balletic scene changes. The lace scrim in the background, the awesome pink sheers gliding in the scene changes (particularly evocative in Mrs. Higgins hands), the staging with its "viewpoints" technique, all kept us in the delicious ambiguity of theatre. We believe the world of the actors, yet at the same time appreciate that it is all a fiction, a performance.
The first seconds of this production set the mood. We were immediately in rainy London, on the streets, with people rushing by (I was in the front row and felt immediacy of the action right at my knees). The silhouettes of scene changes turned functionality into shadow play, particularly evocative against the lace backdrop. The set articulated the actors' emotional positions and changes, arranged in planes that each functioned to place our imaginations in the right spot in the story: from the immediacy of that first scene at audience level with characters rushing left and right, to the main stage where the "sets" played left and right, to the central French doorway that became the frame for change. The back passage, again for left and right movement, visually and imaginatively supported the whole. It was a metaphor for change in the characters. It is there that we first see Higgins, still, silhouetted, observing. And while we watch him talk, talk, talk throughout the course of the play, we see that, while he can effect change in Eliza, he remains stubbornly fixed in his temper and temperament, the Dr. House of 1914. But then, do we want him to change?
The whole ensemble is to be commended for exploiting the entire space Shaw allows: from the staging that leaves no area or volume unattended (Leon Battista Alberti would have approved) to the costumes, including the very pertinent hats, that were based on historical research. Those women bobbies during the First World War were the equivalent of the Rosie the Riveters in the Second. They substituted for the men in the trenches. The suit of the newly rich Doolittle outfitted with mother-of-pearl buttons from the lapels to the cuffs was just what such fellows wore when they were dressed to the nines. "Pearlies" they were called. The ladies' costumes reminded me of those Oscar Kirchner Berlin Street Scene of 1913 (NY MOMA, below).
This is college theatre where attention to significant detail is all important for the education of collaborating students and for the college community itself. That the cast and crew could bring this all off as a unity, without getting tripped up on egos, gimmicks or scholarship, shows that we are indeed a maturing theatre program. Thanks to all involved.
