Pygmalion, like its author, has always been a thornier bitch than people tend to remember. In George Bernard Shaw’s
anti-morality tale, two “old bachelors” (Henry Higgins and Colonel Pickering) train a young street peddler (Eliza Doolittle) to pass as a blue-blooded duchess—basically, two Doctors Frankenstein treat a lower-class woman as their corpse, trying to coax her into full humanity. Pygmalion spills over with wit and jokes, but it’s no farce. It’s a nasty satire with a sharp and snaggletoothed bite.
From the beginning, directors have tried to blunt its teeth. There’s the musical My Fair Lady, of course, which plays up the romance between Higgins and Doolittle. And there’s the famous exchange between Shaw and the play’s first director, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, who tried to “sweeten” the play’s ambiguous ending (in which Doolittle shrugs off Higgins, and he smugly assumes she’ll come crawling back) by having Higgins toss Doolittle a bouquet of flowers. “My ending makes money, you ought to be grateful,” Tree sniffed. “Your ending is damnable,” Shaw snarled. “You ought to be shot.”
But this Pygmalion, by Seattle Shakespeare Company, appropriately rests on the script’s thorns instead of its laurels. Its best moments have little to do with Doolittle or Higgins: They belong to Higgins’s mother (a stately but exasperated Jeanne Paulsen) and Doolittle’s father (the charmingly louche A. Bryan Humphrey). Both characters shoot slug-sized holes in the arrogant assumption that upward mobility is the road to happiness. Mrs. Higgins sees through the old bachelors’ callousness, and when Mr. Doolittle approaches the Doctors Frankenstein for a five-pound bribe in exchange for his daughter, Pickering balks, saying he’ll “make bad use of it.”
“Not me, Guv’na, so help me, I won’t,” Mr. Doolittle says. He intends to drink the money away, he proudly proclaims, and not invest it in some silly pretense of bettering himself: “Don’t you be afraid that I’ll save it and spare it and live idle on it. There won’t be a penny of it left by Monday. I’ll have to go to work same as if I’d never had it. It won’t pauperize me, you bet.” Charmed by his speech, Higgins offers him 10 pounds. The old garbageman refuses this generosity on philosophical grounds: “Ten pounds is a lot of money. It makes a man feel prudent-like, and then good-bye to happiness!”
Middle-class “charity,” Pygmalion argues, is condescending at its best and noxious at its worst. You could compare Shaw’s “charitable” middle-class buffoons with Charles Dickens’s “charitable” heroes (Scrooge at the end of A Christmas Carol or Mr. Brownlow, the savior of Oliver Twist) and think about George Orwell’s argument that Dickensian charity gives wealthy folks a cheap, sentimental end run around having to consider the structural-economic causes of poverty. You could also imagine Pygmalion vis-à-vis our latest fads about the perfectible person—the old Doctors Frankenstein would turn her into a Hollywood celebrity, making her take up yoga, quit smoking, and shop at organic farmers markets. But those are other arguments for other days.
This Pygmalion, directed by Jeff Steitzer, begins a little cold. All the actors in the first scene, when Higgins and Pickering first meet Doolittle on a rainy street corner where she’s trying to sell flowers, nasally blare their lines like a pack of air-raid sirens. (Perhaps, at the Sunday matinee I attended, the cast was simply hungover.) But the production soon warms to itself and the actors to the modulating keys of its prickly comedy.
The only glaring failure in this Pygmalion is a design choice by Jason Phillips, who thought crude, pixelated projections on a screen upstage would be a good idea: animated rain falling past a lamppost, vases and fans and scientific instruments moving awkwardly around the screen like a crappy 19th-century version of a screen saver. In the program, Phillips says he has designed “well over 300 shows” in Las Vegas, Reno/Tahoe, and Atlantic City, which might explain his choice. If Mr. Phillips’s projector “accidentally” fell from a great height, I suspect he’d be the only one who’d complain. 
