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Dear Liar's life in letters

by Robert von Stein Redick

Dear Liar plays through September 24 at the Arts Conservatory Theater and Studio. Call (207) 761-2465.

"If I could write letters like yours, I would write letters to God," wrote Mrs. Patrick Campbell to George Bernard Shaw. A century later the world is catching up with her sentiment.

It happened before anyone could sound the alarm. E-mail grew easy. Old arguments resumed. Nagging acquaintances you thought you'd ditched forever began tapping (if not actually pressing their noses) on your virtual window. And the letter -- that immanently personal, paper-based, snail-paced form of human testimony -- vanished in the ion storm. Even those of us who cut our literary teeth on the epistle saw our precious files shrink drastically after 1990. Soon God may be the only one left without a mailbox in hyperspace.

But if the letter truly dies, who can doubt that a whole art form will die with it? Certainly no one who attends Dear Liar, the eloquent if slightly numb production at the Arts Conservatory Theater and Studio. Calling itself "A Biography in Two Acts," Jerome Kilty's play sketches the relationship of Shaw, hailed by late Victorians as the finest comic playwright since Shakespeare; and Campbell, the actress he wooed, collaborated and sparred with for 40 years.

The stage is appropriately spare: two English studies with writing desks, minimal furniture, threadbare Persian rugs. Above Shaw's desk hangs his own portrait, while Campbell's wall is graced with that of one of her beloved Pekinese (either Moonbeam or Pinky Panky Poo). Fine details, historical or not: they underscore the one's vanity and the other's slightly nutty tenderness.

From the start, their encounters are half dance, half duel. Shaw (John Hickson) is a sturdy old elf with accusing eyes; Campbell (Muriel Kenderdine) a self-possessed diva, used to being admired. In that category Shaw was not stingy: she was "his goddess," "his harp," "his dearest dearest." Already married, he set about seducing her with adolescent zeal. The record suggests that she dashed his carnal hopes, but this queen of the English stage did become his lifelong friend. To the delight of England, she also became Eliza Doolittle, the flower girl turned society starlet of Shaw's first West End hit, Pygmalion.

To say (as discussions of Dear Liar tend to) that the play is "adapted" from this pair's famously witty correspondence is accurate. "Drafted" would be no less so. Most of the dialog is actually an edited recital. Hickson and Kenderdine are both on stage, but take turns pretending to be alone, writing. It could be torture. But since any exchange between artists is itself an opportunity for making art, this recital is inflamed, satiric, erotic, and very funny. "Never did a man paint his infatuation across the heavens as I did for you," Shaw declares. Minutes later Campbell replies: "You smother me with your bellows of self and your egotistical snortings."

Kilty's breaks the rhythm with face-to-face moments, the best of which reveal both artist's achievements in their crafts. In Pygmalion, 49-year-old Campbell must play a teenage girl from the slums. Rehearsing in her London home, Shaw reads the part of Henry Higgins, Britain's greatest phoneticist, for whom Eliza Doolittle's elocutionary transformation becomes a struggle of pride. Author and character here marvelously converge: Shaw berates Campbell for butchering the Cockney accent ("Don't sit their crooning like a bilious pigeon!), while Higgins assaults Eliza for having one in the first place ("You incarnate insult to the English language!"). Through it all Campbell remains every bit the professional, but daggers shoot from her eyes.

Such effective understatement is a rare virtue, in theater or any art, and this Embassy Players production has it aplenty. The trouble here is that the virtue is taken nearly to a fault. Both artists deploy their arsenals of eloquence and literacy deftly. Yet the eloquence means less than it might if the script's opportunities for contrast were better exploited. Everything feels like a letter. Even their face-to-face encounters. Even their bitterest fights. The emotional range of the performance is thus rather severely curtailed.

Most underplayed of all is Shaw's romantic fixation on Campbell. At its height, while letters to his wife concerned her bronchitis and his lumbago, Shaw penned outrageous sonnets to Campbell: "Oh darling, turn to me, rejoice and bite my breasts and ravish all my store." Such transports of feeling don't trouble Hickson's Shaw, or so much as ruffle Kenderdine's aplomb. But shouldn't they?

There are exceptions to this general truth -- Shaw's response to the death of Campbell's son in the trenches of World War 1 is a magnificent moment of agony. When the army chaplain writes a comforting letter, the pacifist Shaw explodes: "To hell with your chaplain and his tragic gentleness! Gratifying, isn't it? Consoling. It only needs a letter from the king to make me feel that the shell was a blessing in disguise."

Scenes like this testify not only to the actors' talents, but once again to the beauty of the medium. Letters can soothe emotions -- that is one of their great advantages over e-mail, destroyer of distances and tact. But they can also house great emotions, clarify them, guarantee them a stage for as long as one's writing hand -- or a performance -- holds out.

This evening's passions are exclusively handwritten, and this will no doubt alienate some. But if you know the electric charge a few sheets of stationary can hold -- than by all means treat yourself. Letters provide the shackles for this Dear Liar, but they also give it wings.

Robert von Stein Redick can be reached at robvsredick@earthlink.net.