Word: shavian
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...embodied by bewhiskered Sergei Saranoff leading the harebrained charge, and for whom "higher love" is typified by the couple that coos and clutches effusively. Yet in spite of the laughter still echoing in the theater--for this is a funny play--Bluntschli wins out soberly with a perfect Shavian love affair with a heroine he has never kissed...
...Petkoff, must sit on Bluntschli's revolver after the fugitive Servian captain has clambered through her window and taken refuge in her boudoir. Hoo-ha! What's more, H. Rodney Clark's Bluntschli is such a card, and Anne K. Ames's Raina such a flighty creature, that the Shavian prospect of sincere and kindly intercourse never dares rear its gentle graying cranium on stage during the next 90 minutes. What does appear is a shallow but lively confrontation between the bombastic Bulgarians and an unflappable Bluntschli, the production packaged appropriately in Scott Joplin ragtime and stage directions that divest...
...show that the decisions Bluntschli makes are sincere responses to real crises--the love affair here has been reduced to a flirtation and the specter of war that is supposed to haunt the play has been revamped as a slap-stick--yet Clark struggles to portray a modern Shavian hero...
...ANOTHER SHAVIAN hero here is the shrewd servant Louka (played convincingly by Roberta Dahlberg) who without pondering irrelevantly about higher love, cashes in on Sergius's moral earnestness to gain a betrothal. Stephen Kolzak turns in a priggish performance as the servile servant Nicola. The casting that sets the tone for the production, however, is that of hulking Tom Shea and lisping Lois Pike as Raina's parents. They are real bulls in the china shop...
...IMPORTANT point to remember about this sequence of events is that they are all, or almost all, part of the Patient's dream. Since the dream has no clear beginning or end, the line separating reality from fantasy is left ambiguous. This appears to be a deliberate Shavian device, designed to reflect the ambiguity of the play's ultimate message about the possibility or impossibility of maintaining any kind of belief in the face of the horrors of modern civilization. In any case, the dream aspect of the play accounts for its fantastic, disconnected quality, its confusing jumble of themes...