THEATER : South Coast Rep Takes On ‘Man and Superman’ : * The play, Shaw’s longest and most ambitious, is rarely staged whole. But director Martin Benson finds the idea of staging only one part “unthinkable.”

Two decades after he wrote “Man and Superman,” George Bernard Shaw looked back on what was his longest and certainly most ambitious play and concluded in one of his typically Olympian critiques that he had been only partially successful because his impulse to entertain had obscured the work’s deeper intent.

“I took the legend of Don Juan in its Mozartian form and made it a dramatic parable of Creative Evolution,” Shaw wrote in 1921. “But being then at the height of my invention and comedic talent, I decorated it too brilliantly and lavishly. I surrounded it with a comedy of which (the parable) formed only one act, and that act was so completely episodical . . . that the comedy could be detached and played by itself.”

Indeed, with Shaw’s own encouragement, that is what happened during the play’s first outing, two years after he published the complete four-act version. “Man and Superman” was staged in 1905 without its third act, an epic dream that transfigures the principal characters of the Victorian comedy into a quartet of legendary immortals led by Don Juan and the Devil in philosophical arias on the meaning of love, death, civilization and, inevitably, Shaw’s cherished Life Force. Since then, common theatrical practice has separated “Man and Superman” into two parts. Moreover, the “Don Juan in Hell” sequence is customarily mounted as a self-contained one-act drama of ideas (it lasts more than an hour on its own), the precedent for which was set in 1907, again, with Shaw’s approval.

But for Martin Benson, who is directing “Man and Superman” at South Coast Repertory, the prospect of staging an admittedly stylish, deliciously witty but ultimately conventional drawing-room romance without its more serious intellectual core was unappealing and, he dares to say, “unthinkable.”

That is why the SCR Mainstage production of “Man and Superman”--now in preview performances for a season-opening premiere on Friday--not only represents one of SCR’s larger undertakings but also clocks in at 3 1/4 hours, even with judicious text trims and a single intermission.

As Shaw biographer Michael Holroyd has noted, the great Irish playwright always wanted “Man and Superman” to be staged in its complete version. Shaw was nonetheless “of several minds” about its advisability--not least while writing the play. It was “as long as three Meyerbeer operas,” he claimed, “and no audience that had not already had a Shaw education could stand it.”

There was also the question of tone. The sudden elevation from a more or less frivolous cat-and-mouse battle of the sexes to the sublime plateau of a pulsing ideological debate had the effect of “grand opera (set) in the middle of a musical comedy,” Shaw noted. Even he was not exempt from boggling at the full-length version. “I tried to see it myself once and nearly died of it,” he is reported to have quipped.

In these post-modern times, however, discontinuity of tone hardly seems an issue. Much late-20th-Century art thrives on it, in fact. And it would come as no surprise if Benson, who likes to refer to Shaw as one of our freshest writing talents, manages to trump the discontinuity of tone with a fin de siecle conceit that Shaw may never have dreamed of.

The production design alone is likely to do it. Cliff Faulkner’s non-realistic set has everybody and every thing , including skeletal Victorian appointments, floating airily on a stage of painted clouds that sweep skyward in majestic bliss. Paulie Jenkins has lit the scenes with pastel pinks and blues, sometimes drenching the clouds with silvery hues that heaven itself might envy.

Shigeru Yaji has gone the other way, toward comparatively conservative dress, outfitting the players in tastefully rich but purposely realistic Victorian costumes. The sound design by Michael Roth tweaks the ear with an assortment of musical snippets from Mozart to Roy Orbison and Frank Sinatra.

SCR is no stranger to Shaw, of course. “Man and Superman” will be the ninth Shaw production since Benson and David Emmes founded the theater, a Tony Award-winner, 27 years ago. Although SCR may not be the house that Shaw built, its record of devotion to him makes it something of a Shavian Bayreuth.

During SCR’s third season, in 1966, Emmes staged “Candida.” He did “Arms and the Man” the year after, and directed “You Never Can Tell” twice--in 1989 and last June at the Singapore Festival of Arts on SCR’s first international tour. Benson did “Major Barbara” twice--in 1965 and 1983--and a prize-laden “Misalliance” in 1987. Guest director John Allison staged “Saint Joan” in 1984.

For all that, Benson had never seen a full-length “Man and Superman” until last season at Berkeley Repertory, when he was deciding whether to do this SCR production. In fact, he and SCR dramaturge John Glore used Berkeley Rep’s edited version, by Amlin Gray, as a guide to their own script cuts.

John de Lancie and Marnie Mosiman, who are husband and wife, star in the SCR production--with each playing dual roles. De Lancie, who doubles as Don Juan, is the bachelor Jack Tanner, an outspoken freethinker and radical pamphleteer who fears marriage as one of the chief hypocrisies of society in general and his social class (the idle rich) in particular. Mosiman, who doubles as Dona Ana, plays the marriage-minded Ann Whitefield, a coquettish man hunter who has drawn a bead on Tanner.

Filling out the cast are George Ede as Roebuck Ramsden and the Commander, Jarion Monroe as Mendoza and the Devil, John Walcutt as Octavius, Lynne Griffin as Violet, Patricia Fraser as Mrs. Whitefield, Don Sparks as Henry Straker, David Anthony Smith as Hector Malone and Richard Doyle as Mr. Malone.

“Man and Superman” continues in preview performances through Thursday and opens Friday at South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Dr iv e, Costa Mesa. It runs Tuesdays through Sundays through Oct. 11. Tickets: $23 to $30; previews : $15 to $17. Information: (714) 957-4033.