THEATER REVIEW ‘PYGMALION’ : Never the Twain : The ever-fresh war between the sexes is waged with first-rate performances in the lead roles of Eliza and Henry.

As fireworks fly between phonetics professor Henry Higgins and his would-be triumph of social reclamation, Eliza Doolittle, it’s hard to resist a rueful smile of recognition at the never-ending follies between men and women.

George Bernard Shaw’s timeless insights still ring hilariously, if somewhat disconcertingly, true in the Pacific Conservatory of the Performing Arts’ revival of “Pygmalion” (the play that inspired the popular musical “My Fair Lady”).

Higgins’ attempt to cast another being in the image of his own feminine ideal, only to confront the immutable reality of her independent spirit, has a ring of familiarity about it, especially for contemporary males. And just as many women will appreciate the frustrations faced by Eliza in getting her man to speak in an emotional vocabulary that is completely alien to him.

Even better, the artificially heady air that plagues many of Shaw’s plays is held nicely in check by director Roger DeLaurier’s light touch and by first-rate performances from Lisa Paulsen and Stephen Paul Johnson in the leads.

“Women upset everything,” fumes Johnson’s Higgins. “When you let them in your life, you find that the woman is driving at one thing while you’re driving at another . . . one wants to go north and the other south; and the result is that both have to go east, though they both hate the east wind.”

Higgins’ solution is the life of pure intellect to which he’s devoted himself. Johnson has to work doubly hard to overcome the fact that he’s too young for the role of a confirmed bachelor this set in his ways and, to his credit, he compensates through performance rather than makeup.

Johnson’s Higgins is a wildly unbalanced mess worthy of Shaw’s penchant for comic exaggeration. Just beneath the polished cerebral veneer are undeveloped emotional currents revealed in offhand remarks (like when he tells his mother: “My idea of a lovable woman is somebody as like you as possible”).

In less subtle moments of character revelation, Johnson keeps Higgins’ quirky arrogance and temper tantrums ready to erupt at the slightest provocation.

Which they receive in large doses at the hands of Paulsen’s deliciously gutsy Eliza, who under Higgins’ tutelage evolves from “draggletailed guttersnipe” to society lady without sacrificing her central identity as a fighter and a survivor. Paulsen handles the different stages of Eliza’s transformation with unwavering precision, best of all showing us the emotional clarity that remains a woman’s home court advantage regardless of her social class.

This is the gulf that divides them, of course--where he sees the supreme importance of scientific principle, she values emotional relatedness; where he craves rational discourse and freedom, she seeks affection and commitment. They want entirely different things from each other and, worst of all, they can’t even talk about it. But they can argue about it, which they do particularly well in two highly charged confrontation scenes that effectively rebut Shaw’s frequent label as a hopeless pedant.

Higgins’ vocabulary stops at the sunlit world of ideas (the closest thing in the male experience to childbirth) while Eliza’s originates in the lunar ebb and flow of emotional tides--they approach each other but never touch. To Higgins, Eliza is simply an experiment, and even his attempt to drape this “statue” in the polite forms of society is incomplete because he cannot teach what he doesn’t know--that manners are the vocabulary of feelings, just as words are the vocabulary of ideas.

Eliza must discover this for herself, in the process surpassing her onetime mentor. “The true difference between a lady and a flower girl,” she reveals in the end, “is not how she behaves but how she’s treated.” She attributes her insight to her treatment by Col. Pickering, Higgins’ better behaved partner in the grand social experiment--though in the role actor Todd Patrick Breaugh misses the full extent of the innate gentlemanly qualities that ought to make Pickering more than a second fiddle.

Faring much better in his plum supporting role is Charlie Bachman as Eliza’s reprobate father, the vehicle for some of Shaw’s funniest swipes at the class structure and its prevailing moral hypocrisies. (“Have you no morals, man?” demands an outraged Higgins at Doolittle’s offer to sell his daughter for 50 pounds. “Can’t afford them, Gov’ner,” comes the cheerful reply.)

Just as in his social perspective, Shaw the playwright insisted on staking out his own dramatic territory and resisted the fairy-tale ending of a neatly reconciled Higgins and Eliza. Even two people who might be right for each other may not end up together, and the situation at the close of the play is left deliberately ambiguous.

Shaw always maintained that Eliza would marry her ardent if somewhat shallow suitor Freddy (Robert J. Hamilton) out of pragmatism, though director DeLaurier seems more swayed by romantic optimism without definitively imposing it. As we try to sort it out for ourselves, Shaw’s insight effortlessly spans the intervening decades since 1913, for the legacy of Eliza and her successors in the feminist movement leaves us in equally enigmatic straits. Whatever gains we may have made in diplomacy between the sexes, it’s still a long way from real understanding.

* WHERE AND WHEN

“ Pygmalion” will be performed through April 21 at the Allan Hancock College Marian Theatre in Santa Maria. Evening performances at 8 p.m. Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays are $16 and $14; matinees at 2 p.m. Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays are $12 and $9. Call (800) 221-9496 for reservations or information.