The second main stage offering of the 2013 Williamstown Theatre Festival (WTF) July 17- 27 is the classic story of Pygmalion. It is the work that won George Bernard Shaw the Pulitzer Prize in literature in 1925, and his timeless characters – which most people remember from My Fair Lady – have been the subject of debate ever since. The big question most people wonder about is whether the professor and the flower girl he tutored were in love or not. Over the decades since its first presentation, producers, players and directors have tried to tilt the play one way or the other on this question.

Robert Sean Leonard’s analytical mind takes a whole different approach, and he describes how he tried to find a new way into the mind of Henry Higgins, using the very words that Shaw wrote as his key. Yesterday we talked about this and the upcoming Williamstown Theatre Production which is being directed by former WTF artistic director Nicholas Martin. A splendid cast welcomes back former WTF apprentice Heather Lind in the major role of Eliza Dolittle. She has been knocking ‘em dead lately both on stage and on screen. She’s playing a bit of catch up since the work had an earlier January production at the Old Globe in San Diego with a differnt Eliza. Much of that cast and creative team is back for this WTF show, and in Part Two we will be talking with Heather Lind about how she prepared.

Robert Sean Leonard


You probably know Robert Sean Leonard as Dr James Wilson in TV medical drama House (and, if your memory stretches back that far, from the film Dead Poets Society).
Leonard believes there is a big difference between acting for the theatre vs. television. As Dr. James Wilson on House some of his biggest lines involved the challenging deep drama of uttering things like: ‘Seen Cuddy’s ass today?’

He was fortunate to have seen good theatre at an early age. “I was about 14 and felt the hairs go up on the back of my neck when I saw my first play by George Bernard Shaw, Arms and the Man. You never get that in TV.”

But we must never run down television since it is what gave him just what he needed to end up in the Berkshires this summer, and where he just bought a house in (surprise!) Williamstown. офигеть, он там купил дом? “Money,” he admits, “it’s what has given him the freedom to pursue To Kill a Mockingbird in London” and spend the summer at America’s favorite summer getaway for actors, the WTF.

In talking with Leonard, it is evidenet that he is not an actor that deals in platitudes, nor answers questions with what we in the journalistic realm call “boiler plate” the theatrical equivalent of political “talking points” where every co-actor is “amazing” and every project is “fantastic”. A passionate fan of the great theatrical writers, his head is full of thoughts about their words. He’s worked on and off Broadway since leaving school at 16 and moving to New York by himself. In 1997 he starred in Dead End, appearing on Broadway for several years before the amazing eight years he worked on the tv series House (2004-2012). Now he is back at the WTF campus, having built up a solid back catalogue in plays by Tom Stoppard, Eugene O’Neill and his favorite, George Bernard Shaw.

Have they changed the ending?

It has been rumored that this Pygmalion may have a new ending, so we asked Leonard. “There is, indeed,” he confided, “And it is a visual, and Shaw inspired. GBS very much wanted to leave the impression that Eliza and Higgins were incompatible and that she would marry Freddy. He made it very clear that this was the impression he wanted to leave with the audience. But from the time he wrote it, people didn’t like that.”

We pressed on for more information. “The new ending is a bit tricky, and a bit Nicky. It’s a bit of a parlour trick in that we’ve got to create a relationship that’s fun to watch, between people you like when they are together. But then we sort of pull the rug from under the audience at the end of the play and say they don’t stay together. And that’s what we have to do….” Leonard smiled and left that sentence dangling.

I asked Leonard did he find Higgins at all like Dr. House, since he is also a negative and perfectionist kind of person even fusty. “I don’t see him as negative, I see him as having great joy. And natty rather than fusty. But you are right, he is very focused on one thing. It gives him incredible pleasure and he finds it – life – very rich and full. I think he adores his life.” And enjoy challenges? “Yes, and he loves Pickering, and he loves sounds and he loves his maid, and especially loves his mother. So fussy or fusty is not the way into the role.”

But as to the relationship, he reminds us how “Eliza says she done with it, she’s not interested in someone who doesn’t care for her. Or becomes of her. At one point Higgins says ‘Liza don’t be an idiot, once for all I do my work and I go my way. Ido my work not caring a tuppence what happens to either of us.’ Which I love. It was probably Shaw’s main point, he didn’t understand what women wanted.”

And many men don’t to this day.

Pygmalian, says Leonard, “Is one of Shaw’s salient plays regarding that most fascinating of relationships, the role of men and women. And it ends with: ‘It doesn’t work, Eliza, you have to marry someone young and simple to be your husband.”

The classics and his roles

As to having honed in on mostly great, albeit older writers: “I’m drawn to great work, it doesn’t matter if it is modern or not. And there aren’t that many great modern plays. ”



His New ELiza Dolittle, Heather Lind
“The new liza? We rolled the dice and got lucky. She is incredibly talented and she’s not hard to look at which is secondary, but still very nice and she is an incredibly hard worker. She got this role and was basically told you have to play catch-up. Everyone else around you has done the role, and when she showed up she did not disappoint. I look forward to getting up every morning, mostly because of her, I love to work with her.”

The prognosis on Nicholas Martin

And how are things with Nicky, how is he to work with? “For me it’s an old familiarity,” says Leonard. “Nicky has done four plays with me and I have known him for 25 years. It’s great fun to work with him, and always easier to work with someone you don’t have to get to know first. ” The stroke has slowed his speech a bit but not his mind. “He’s still wickedly funny, and very, very sharp. The stroke – aside from how he slurs his speech a bit – you’d never know he’d ever had a problem.”

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His cousin Denise co-signed the lease on the NY place.
I would bet he'll keep the Williamstown house for summer trips. The Berkshires is a very lovely area, and if he is that enamored with the theater there, he'll probably do the festival each year.

Она же говорила, что он продал дом с Санта-Монике.
Возможно она работает в недвижимости или в налоговой, потому что не знаю откуда она берет такую информацию.