Gingold Theatrical Group Presents Project Shaw

Project Description

' Project Shaw' is a monthly, public reading of the complete works of George Bernard Shaw, which total fifty plays. Each Shaw play is presented in a concert-reading format. This series has been scheduled through December of 2007, though we expect it to extend into 2008. We are a fully incorporated 501.c.3 (not-for-profit) company as of March 2007.

players When this undertaking was launched, it quickly attracted the interest of the theatrical world. When the first reading was announced for January of 2006, some of our country's finest and most respected actors were contacting us, eager to participate. Cherry Jones, Alec Baldwin, Rosemary Harris, Brian Murray, Philip Bosco, Tyne Daly, and Marian Seldes are just a few of the actors who have pledged their time to us. Newspapers phoned about writing feature articles, and potential audience members started calling and writing.
As members of the legendary Players Club on Gramercy Park South, we secured their large hall without charge. Shaw had been a member at this venerable 150-year-old theatrical club, and had even spoken there. It seemed an appropriate choice for a performance space until we were able to find our own. We began doing extensive research on the plays we'd chosen to produce and direct, and then edited the plays (using Shaw's extensive notes and essays) into cohesive versions, which would well serve the concert reading format. Some of these works have never been performed in New York City.

After casting our first reading, ARMS AND THE MAN, with some of Broadway's most illustrious actors (including Malcolm Gets, Marc Kudisch, Nancy Anderson and George S. Irving), a flurry of interest erupted. When The Players began taking reservations the reading was totally booked in one day. By the time of our performance on Monday, January 23rd we had an extensive waiting list. The New York Times did a feature article in their March 18th Sunday Arts and Leisure section which only increased public interest. Time Out NY ran a full-page about the project in their July 13th edition. Even some Los Angeles publications (including the Hollywood Reporter) have written about Project Shaw. THE NEW YORKER surprised us with a page-long 'critics choice' in their February 19, 2007 issue, and most New York papers seem to be joining in the fascination with Project Shaw. As we've also been featured, monthly, on Playbill.com, actors from the world of television and film have been calling up and asking to play their favorite Shaw roles.

Mission
As a life-long devotee of George Bernard Shaw's many plays, I began to research the possibility of presenting every play Shaw ever wrote for the stage. This would include even the sketches, one act plays and political parodies. Shaw believed strongly in each person's need to forge their own individual path in life while actively taking responsibility for their own actions and place in society. Bringing together likeminded colleagues, we decided to present each of Shaw's plays in concert readings. The goal is for our theatre company to produce two Shaw plays a year, along with one new play. Taking the name of my life-long friend, actress Hermione Gingold, the wheels are set in place.

Shaw was a dedicated Humanist: affirming the dignity and worth of all people, based on the ability to determine right and wrong by appealing to universal human qualities. As a result, he devoted a great deal of his energy on behalf of equal rights for women. Almost every one of his plays deal, in some part, with the fundamental need for women to vote, to work, to be an active part of society, and to share in governing the society they live in. Knowing this, it was particularly important to me that our group involved the active participation of women.

For our entire first season we opted not to charge admission, as Shaw would have appreciated. We have, in fact, existed through the generous donations of our patrons. Beginning in January or 2007 we are charging $15 admission per reading. None of us on the staff are being paid. Each cast member is paid $50 per reading and are given dinner.

Please note that our first donation-matching grant came from The Ford Foundation. The belief that we are providing an important service helps fuel the passion we bring. We are also aware that, for this project to continue, we must begin the process of obtaining foundation, corporate and individual donations in a systemized and successful manner. The sense of contributing is joyously palpable as we hear, at each performance, the intense emotions these plays inspire. Shaw has transcended the last hundred years with clear thinking, reason, perspective, insight and a great deal of wit and humor. With his hand on our shoulder, we are on our way.

Educational Outreach
International theatre companies, devoted to producing Shaw, have contacted us, and we have been in a dialogue to duplicate our reading series in other cities, both in the U.S. and abroad. London's Garrick Club, the oldest English Speaking actors' club, has expressed an interest, as well. In an additional effort to engage young New Yorkers, we will have students attending our readings in conjunction with Baruch College's English composition course. After they study the designated play, they'll see it come to life in our reading, after which I'll join them in class to discuss the work.

Future Plans
We will secure a fully functional theatre space in which we would continue to present the series of Shaw's complete works by fully producing two Shaw plays a year and one new playwright's work. The new work will be commissioned as a contemporary voice carrying on the classic Shavian principles. In this space, we also hope to devote one matinee a week exclusively to an audience of children from New York schools. Our hope is that the Gingold Theatrical Group will carve a permanent niche for Shaw in the cultural life of New York, bringing his canon and his precepts to new audiences, while encouraging young artists to breath these humanist ideals into their contributions for the future.

David Staller
Founder and Artistic Director
Gingold Theatrical Group

Hermione Gingold
(December 9, 189?-May 24, 1987) was an English actress known for her sharp-tongued, eccentric persona, an image enhanced by her sharp nose and chin, as well as her deep voice, a result of vocal nodes which her mother encouraged her not to remove. She appeared on stage, on radio, in films, on television, and in recordings.

Born Hermione Ferdinanda Gingold in London, she was the daughter of an upper-class Austrianborn Jewish financier Lionel Gingold and English-born Kate Walters. On her father's side she was descended from the celebrated Solomon Sulzer, a famous synagogue cantor and Jewish liturgical composer in Vienna, who was a friend of composer Schubert and was made a freeman of the city on his 70th birthday. Gingold was a childhood friend of Noel Coward until her mother warned her away from him. First appearing on stage in 1909, she was originally a coloratura soprano and performed in Shakespearean dramas such as "The Merchant of Venice" and "Troilus and Cressida" and worked with Charles Hawtrey as an understudy. In the 1930s, her quirky, ribald comedic sense became famous through musical revues. She married British publisher Michael Joseph in 1918, with whom she had two sons, Stephen and Leslie. After her divorce in 1926, she married writer and lyricist Eric Maschwitz, whom she divorced in 1945. Gingold was also known for her unruly hair. It was said she styled it by sticking her head out the window and letting the wind sculpt it.

Gingold was introduced to U.S. servicemen during World War II through the London revue "Sweet and Low." After moving to the United States in 1951, Gingold became a great success there as well. She won a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in the 1958 movie Gigi in which she played Madame Alvarez, a retired Parisian courtesan who was Gigi's grandmother and mentor. She sang "I Remember it Well" with Maurice Chevalier. She succeeded Jo Van Fleet as the monstrously possessive mother who is driving her son crazy in American playwright Arthur Kopit's Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad (1963) on Broadway and also in London.

Gingold played the mayor's snooty wife Eulalie Mackechnie Shinn in The Music Man (1962), starring Robert Preston and Shirley Jones, and was part of the original 1973 Broadway cast of Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music in the role of the elderly Madame Armfeldt
In 1977, with conductor Karl Bohm, she won a Grammy Award for Best Album for Children for Prokofiev: Peter and the Wolf and Saint-Saëns: Carnival of the Animals. She was a regular guest on television talk shows, especially Jack Paar's, where audiences loved her stories. She is quoted as saying, "Fighting is essentially a masculine idea; a woman's weapon is her tongue." GTG founder, David Staller, was a great friend of Hermione Gingold’s for many years. Forming this company in her name is his tribute to her.

George Bernard Shaw
(1856-1950)

George Bernard Shaw I rish dramatist, literary critic, a socialist spokesman, and a leading figure in the 20th century theater. Shaw was a freethinker, defender of women's rights, and advocate of equality of income. In 1925 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Shaw accepted the honour but refused the money.
George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin, where he grew up in something close to genteel poverty. His father, George Carr Shaw, was in the wholesale grain trade. Lucinda Elisabeth (Gurly) Shaw, his mother, was the daughter of an impoverished landowner. She was 16-years younger than her husband. George Carr was a drunkard - his example prompted his son to become a teetotaller. When he died in 1885, his children and wife did not attend his funeral. Young Shaw and his two sisters were brought up mostly by servants. Shaw's mother eventually left the family home to teach music, singing, in London.
I n 1898 Shaw married the wealthy Charlotte Payne-Townshend. They settled in 1906 in the Hertfordshire village of Ayot St. Lawrence. Shaw remained with Charlotte until her death, although he was occasionally linked with other women.
He began his literary career by writing music and drama criticism, and novels. A vegetarian, who eschewed alcohol and tobacco, Shaw joined the Fabian Society in 1884, served on its executive committee from 1885 to 1911. A man of many causes, Shaw supported abolition of private property, radical change in the voting system, campaigned for the simplification of spelling, and the reform of the English alphabet. As a public speaker, Shaw gained the status of one of the most sought-after orators in England. In 1895 Shaw became a drama critic for the Saturday Review.
I n his plays Shaw combined contemporary moral problems with ironic tone and paradoxes, "Shavian" wit, which have produced such phrases as "He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches", "England and America are two countries divided by a common language", "Christianity might be a good thing if anyone ever tried it", and "I never resist temptation because I have found that things are bad for me do not tempt me." Discussion and intellectual acrobatics are the basis of his drama. During his long career, Shaw wrote over 50 plays. He continued to write them even in his 90s.
George Bernard Shaw died at Ayot St. Lawrence, Hertfordshire, on November 2, 1950. He was cremated and it was his wish that his ashes be mixed with those of his wife, Charlotte - who had died seven years before.