Editing a Classic Text--an Artistic Endeavor

In his review of George Bernard Shaw’s “Man and Superman” at South Coast Repertory, Don Shirley takes exception to the way in which the play has been edited. In doing so, he attributes SCR’s playing version of the text to Amlin Gray, a mistake which must be corrected at the outset. Although Martin Benson, the director of SCR’s production, did refer to a version prepared by Gray for Berkeley Rep, along with versions from San Diego’s Old Globe and Washington’s Arena Stage, none of these is being used as the performance text for SCR’s production.

Benson and I (as the dramaturge for the SCR production) prepared our own version, which was then further refined through Benson’s work with his actors.

That’s the way it should be. To appropriate someone else’s edition

of a play in toto is to shirk a primary responsibility. The SCR text is of necessity a product of SCR’s own artistic collaboration: Its editing choices were made with our production approach in mind and were tested and validated through six weeks of rehearsal and a week of preview performances.

While I find arguable Shirley’s specific opinions (Sept. 10) about the cuts we made for our production, I won’t argue with them here. I do feel, however, that it would be worthwhile to clarify how and why we went about the process of trimming Shaw’s mammoth work down to playable size.

SCR values the text as the center of the theatrical event and our primary objective is always to realize the writer’s vision. Nevertheless, very few classic plays are performed in their entirety any more, at SCR or any other theater in America; not, as Shirley suggests, because actors can’t memorize all those lines (they can), but because audiences won’t sit still for them. Prior to the modern age, theatergoers had no qualms about sitting for four hours or more to take in a play.

More recently, the collective attention span has dwindled, perhaps because movies and television have instilled in us a different sense of rhythm and pace. In today’s theater, three hours’ duration seems to be the outer limit, excepting those rare shows such as “Nicholas Nickleby” or “The Mahabharata,” whose extraordinary length becomes a crucial aspect of the theatrical experience.

So the contemporary producer of such classics as “Hamlet” (four hours plus), “Peer Gynt” (six to seven hours) or Goethe’s “Faust” (off the chart) faces a thorny task. How to keep such plays in the repertory without putting people to sleep or sending them to their cars at intermission?

For “Man and Superman,” which has been known to clock in at five hours, the common solution (endorsed even by Shaw himself) is to eliminate the hourlong “Don Juan in Hell” dream scene or to perform it separately. Yet as Shirley observes the remaining portion of the play, the romantic comedy, seems “surprisingly trivial” and “conventional” by itself. Hence our decision to retain the dream, which serves up the philosophical meat of the play and provides an intellectual context for the otherwise frivolous romance.

We wanted our audience to hear Shaw’s ruminations on the Life Force in the dream scene, thereby to appreciate the comic love story of Jack and Ann as a lighthearted example of the Life Force in action.

This meant that we had to look for other, less convenient ways to condense the play. We aimed for no arbitrary time limit and were prepared to accept as long an evening as would be necessary to do the play justice. As we investigated, each proposed cut was debated, its merits weighed against its faults; ultimately we removed only material which seemed redundant or unhelpfully tangential or, in a few cases, hopelessly obscure.

No cut was made casually. Take, for example, the first-act conversation between Jack and Ann about their shared childhood. Shirley cites this as an example of our infelicitous editing, implying that we dismissed the scene as mere “entertaining repartee.” He argues that our version obscures an audience’s understanding of Jack and Ann’s obsession with one another and the inevitability of their final embrace.

I suggest that we have preserved enough of the scene to make clear Jack and Ann’s deep and longstanding connection. More importantly, the fact that these two have known each other since childhood matters very little in the scheme of the play: as Shaw’s Don Juan tells us, “In the sex relation the pair may be utter strangers to one another, but the Life Force throws them into one another’s arms at the exchange of a glance.”

In other words, Ann and Jack’s final embrace is inevitable because that’s the way the Life Force wants it. All else is beside the point. Such analysis, supported by careful experimentation during rehearsal, led to our decision to eliminate some of the exposition in this scene while preserving its spirit and emotional subtext.

In capable hands, the process of editing a classic text is never a desperate effort to force a Size 9 play into a Size 6 show. It becomes an artistic endeavor whose objective is to hone and polish and streamline the play for contemporary sensibilities--and to do so without damaging the play or reducing the audience’s experience of it. In my opinion, the version of Shaw’s play which we have prepared is, for this day and age and with respect to the goals of our production, considerably better than the one he prepared himself. After all, he anticipated that it would never be staged at all.