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You Never Can Tell I am writing this early on the morning of May 7th,
having just survived a 7 hour first technical rehearsal. For those not in this industry, we are talking about a grueling
experience that is not intended to advance the cause of the actors at all, but rather belongs to the designer's and technicians
who are laboring to realize the images that passed through the director's mind when he conceived his production. From
the actors' standpoint it is utterly non-creative and yet from the audience's it is at the core of the experience they will
have. I cannot imagine what a playwright goes through sitting in the darkened house watching this deconstruction of
his sacred text; I cannot believe it would be any more fun for him than for the actors trying to bring his words to life.
But I know that of all the playwright's I've ever done, none would have understood the neccesity of getting it right
more than Shaw. I
cannot begin to tell you what it means to me to be doing a Shaw play once again. I know what sophistry it is to say
this, yet I must in candor confess that to me of all the thousands of British men and women who have martialed the English
language and sent it into battle on the stage, there is Shakespeare, Shaw and Pinter, and after them all the others. Since
I returned to acting in 2004, I've had the chance to revisit Shakespeare and Pinter, but this is the first Shavian role I've
played since my very first post-college experience as Roebuck Ramsden in Christopher Martin's brilliant production of Man
and Superman at the CSC. As I sat in Shaw was the only playwright who was the subject of a dedicated course I took
as an undergraduate, with a magnificent Shavian scholar, the late Dan H. Laurence. Most of Shaw's plays have an old philistine in them: Alfred
Doolittle in Pygmalion, Hector Hushabye in Heartbreak House, Andrew Undershaft in Major Barbara, and
of course Ramsden. That I wound up playing an old man at the
age of 22 was no surprise to me. I'd been cast as old men all through college and indeed in high school, ever since I played
Creon in Medea in the 10th grade. I must admit that as I sat in the dressing room tonight and stared into the mirror
I was both a little shocked and a little gratified to note that the furrows, creases and hollows I'd painted on my face were
now exactly where I'd imagined they would be and that now no painting would be required. Part of the genius that allowed Shaw to be so prolific was
that his characters were cut out with cookie cutters. Three main archetypes appear again and again throughout all of
his plays: The philistines, the idealists, and the realists. Shaw relished them all and endowed them all with
great life. The philistines were the lucky recipients of some his best and funniest comedy, but the moral was always
embedded in the struggle of the idealists to become realists. In most cases he loved and admired the idealists, but
the salvation of the world was always in the hands of realists, and the world was never in better hands than when a woman
idealist (Shaw was a profound feminist and believed that the future of human kind was almost exclusively in their hands) crossed
over to the light of realism. That is exactly what happens
in You Never Can Tell when the young realist Valentine helps the idealistic Gloria Clandon (played superbly in our production by Lowell Byers and
Jessica Osborne) to see the light only to come to realize that she is not his creation but an equal whose powers in many ways
far outstrip his own. Those of you who saw the two much acclaimed sold-out T. Schreiber productions earlier this season,
Lanford Wilson's Balm in Gilead and David Storey's The Changing Room will have seen Lowell in vastly different
if equally wonderful performances. Peter Judd who was also singled out by critics for his terrific performance in The
Changing Room may also have seen him as Firs in last season's production of The Cherry Orchard, as Coffin in 2009's
The Night of the Iguana and as Grandpa in 2007's You Can't Take it With You. Our production is directed by Robert
Verlaque and should be a real treat. I hope you will be able to make it.
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