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THEATER REVIEW Review: Randall Theatre brings Shaw's classic satire to stage in 'Pygmalion' Comment By Bill Varble for the Mail Tribune MailTribune.com By Bill Varble for the Mail Tribune Posted Mar. 21, 2016 at 2:00 AM By Bill Varble for the Mail Tribune Posted Mar. 21, 2016 at 2:00 AM » Social News Bernard Shaw may no longer be the veritable force of nature he once was in the English-speaking world, but the best of his many plays still find and move audiences. A case in point is the production of “Pygmalion” now playing at the Randall Theatre in downtown Medford. Ably directed by Susan Aversa-Orrego, the play is funnier that your usual play of ideas, and more thoughtful than your usual farce. The action is driven by egotistical Henry Higgins (a wickedly haughty William Babishoff), who bets his fellow phoneticist and new pal Colonel Pickering (William Coyne) that he can teach Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle enough proper English to pass for a duchess at a tony garden party coming up. This in the class-ridden England of a century ago. Shaw in his plays turned his sword-like wit on English society, and “Pygmalion” is no exception. The play’s targets include the English class system, phonics, the status of women and middle-class morality. But in “Pygmalion” more than many of Shaw’s plays, the satire is fairly (for Shaw) gentle. The best-known version of the Pygmalion myth comes to us from Ovid, whose sculptor creates a figure of a woman he falls in love with. Perhaps that’s why audiences have for a century wished and/or suspected that Henry and Eliza end up together (after all, even Shaw, who roundly hated and denounced that idea, called the tale a romance), both in the original play and in its musical version, “My Fair Lady.” You’re not likely to envision a newly minted duchess (or a Cockney flower girl for that matter) falling for this Higgins. The character is typically played as cantankerous but having a certain charm in spite of himself (think Rex Harrison). Babishoff plays him with all the charm of a pit viper. This Higgins is off-putting enough when he’s being cruel (which is usually), but even worse when he laughs, a sound like the shrill braying of a villain in a melodrama. With Higgins’ inability to connect with another person — he has no sexual interest in Eliza, nor interest in her as a human being on any other discernible level — “Pygmalion” is always in danger of falling into speechifying. But Shaw was too skilled a playwright to go quite there. We just want to smack this wanker upside the head. Pickering, played by Coyne as a kinder, gentler twit, is in part a foil for Higgins’ unrequited harshness. He goes along with the cruelty of the experiment of treating a lower-class woman as a sort of trained seal, but he does so without the egregious nastiness of his friend. Caitlyn Olson’s Eliza manages to hang onto her dignity in the middle of all this. The character is highly comic in the first act, and she travels a sharp arc as she gives up her past without knowing what kind of future is available to her. It’s a creditable performance in a demanding role. All this should not be taken to overlook the play’s comic effects. The funniest character is Eliza’s no-good father Alfred (David Rowley). And Olson gets big laughs in the scene in which Eliza appears before Higgins’s mother (Pam Ward) in a test of her phonetic progress and is as stiff as a badly programmed cyborg. Olson delivers two of the play’s best-known lines with relish. Speaking of a robbery, she says, “Them as pinched it done ‘er in.” And there’s the famous (and once shocking) “Walk? Not bloody likely.” This is not a perfect production — Shaw is challenging for professionals, let alone community theater — but it is a spirited go at that vanished Shavian world, buttressed by colorful portrayals of these deceptively complex characters. —Reach freelance writer Bill Varble at varble.bill @gmail.com. By Bill Varble for the Mail Tribune MailTribune.com By Bill Varble for the Mail Tribune Posted Mar. 21, 2016 at 2:00 AM » Comment or view comments Reader Reaction » STAY INFORMED Email NewsLetter Sign Up Today Sign up for our newsletter and have the top headlines from your community delivered right to your inbox. Southern Oregon Directory Featured Businesses Loading... 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