Play Is Prescient, Not Odd

A number of assertions about Bernard Shaw made by Laurie Winer in her review of “Back to Methuselah” (“It’s Long, It’s Loopy, It’s Shaw,” March 11) stand in need of correction.

Far from being “loopy” and “odd” as Winer would have it, Shaw’s parable play has been more aptly described by a perceptive interpreter as an artist’s “philosophical opera a la Wagner without music.” (Actually it does contain considerable word music in its dialogue.) The playwright did conceive this work along the lines of Wagner’s Ring cycle, with leitmotifs recurring throughout the component plays. Rich in myriad allusions, it rings variations on Genesis, Plato, Swift, Ibsen, Wagner and on innumerable other philosophical and literary writings. It even contains the lines widely, and wrongly, ascribed to Robert and John F. Kennedy, who quoted them, not quite accurately. The words are those of the Serpent in the Garden of Eden: “You see things; and you say, ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say, ‘Why not?’ ”

In addition, consider how prescient was Shaw in this masterwork, written three-quarters of a century ago. In it he envisions personal communications by television screens, future alternative modes of human reproduction, the invention of robotic creatures and the evolution of increasing longevity--all developing social realities today, even though the means of their realization may differ.

SIDNEY P. ALBERT

Professor Emeritus of Philosophy

Pasadena