WILLIAMSTOWN -- Happy ending? Those are fighting words.

Most people know the story of "Pygmalion" only from "My Fair Lady," the Broadway musical adapted from that play, asserts Nicholas Martin, director of a new production of George Bernard Shaw’s "Pygmalion" at Williamstown Theatre Festival’s Main Stage through July 27.

In Shaw’s play, Henry Higgins, a linguistics professor, offers a wager that he can change the crude accent of an impoverished flower seller, Eliza Doolittle, and pass her off in society as a proper English lady. He succeeds.

In their 1956 musical, Lerner & Loewe suggest at the end that Higgins and Eliza, constantly at loggerheads during their contentious linguistic lessons, somehow will get together
permanently.

But this decidedly was not the scenario that Shaw had in mind when he wrote "Pygmalion." From its initial production in 1913, and later for film, the playwright fiercely battled those who wanted happy endings.

Clearly, Martin is pleased to be returning to the festival, which he directed from 2008 to 2010, and to be involved once more with "Pygmalion," repeating a triumph earlier this year, in January, at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego.

Martin brought along his Old Globe Henry Higgins, Robert Sean Leonard. "He was most instrumental in my wanting to do the show," confided Martin, who mentioned Leonard’s long list of stage roles, as well as his eight seasons as Dr. James Miller on the hit television series, "House, M.D."

"He’s a real stage creature," said Martin, deeming Leonard the ideal Henry Higgins.

"It’s hard to find a Henry Higgins who has the skill and articulation and the rapid mind that accompanies those things, yet who also has the charm and vulnerability that will make you not hate Henry Higgins, because you should not hate Henry Higgins.

"The other reason I’m excited about this production is a young actress named Heather Lind who is really a remarkable discovery," said Martin of his Eliza Doolittle. "She’s one of those rare actresses who’s got everything -- intelligence, sex appeal. It’s thrilling to watch these two actors together -- quite electric; they have real chemistry."

"My entire life has prepared me for Eliza Doolittle," mused Lind in a separate interview.

A graduate of N.Y.U., Lind, who appeared last summer in Lucy Boyle’s "The Deep Blue" at Williamstown, lists among her credits the Public Theatre’s Shakespeare in the Park productions "The Merchant of Venice" and "The Winter’s Tale."

"The N.Y.U. training really prepared me in all practical, ways -- speech work, dialect work, body work; it opened me up to what a huge task this is, and working with Shakespeare I gained a respect for the language, which I think Shaw was all about."

Eliza’s is Lind’s first Cockney accent. "I worked with a dialect coach, Deborah Hecht, an excellent teacher I had at N.Y.U. We met several times before rehearsals began, to find where the placement is, to find the sounds."

Eliza has a tendency to push her voice: "It’s written into the script that she utters really ugly, irritable sounds. That means warming up, doing exercises to make the voice flexible and healthy." Lind agrees that Eliza requires the regimen of an opera singer.

Leonard’s impressive list of Broadway, Off-Broadway and regional roles include his portrayal of A.E. Housman in Tom Stoppard’s "The Invention of Love," for which he received a Tony Award, and his Edmund Tyrone in Eugene O’Neill’s "Long Day’s Journey Into Night" and Eugene Marchbanks in Shaw’s "Candida," both accorded Tony nominations.

"This was quite a switch for him, but one that he eagerly embraced," said Martin.

Leonard said after ridding himself of the southern accent he’d acquired for his recent London role as Atticus Finch in "To Kill a Mockingbird," and working with Hecht, he believes the role of Henry Higgins is a natural for him.

"Henry Higgins is obsessed with a lot of things Š," Leonard said in a separate interview. "He loves language, the history of language, but he’s never grown up. Eliza’s more grown up then he. She’s more a full human being; he never learns it, but the audience knows.

"Girls are more mature than boys -- look at Juliet. Girls are clever, I don’t know whether we [men] ever catch up. My wife’s more grown up, more human."

Although Higgins shouldn’t be hated, as Martin stressed earlier, "he still has to be slightly punished. He mustn’t get away with his treatment of Eliza," added Martin, recalling an earlier production of the show in which he included the wedding of Eliza and Freddy Hill, her chief admirer.

"But now I give Higgins a moment when he thinks of [he and Eliza] married, [with] nostalgia, if not regret.

"I think this is what Shaw wanted -- not necessarily [a] wedding, but we have the knowledge that Eliza and Henry do not get together. It would have been impossible for that marriage to work -- she and he."

On stage.

‘Pygmalion’ a triumph in Williamstown
By Steve Barnes

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — “What am I fit for?” Eliza Doolittle asks Henry Higgins toward the end of Nicholas Martin’s brilliantly acted, gorgeously designed production of “Pygmalion” at Williamstown Theatre Festival. Mindful of the linguistic precision she’s learned from Higgins over the months he’s worked to turn her from a common Cockney flower girl into a woman he can pass off as a duchess at a society party in Edwardian London, Eliza amends her question: “What have you left me fit for?”

On one level “Pygmalion” is a romantic comedy, and Martin’s production, running through July 28, often produces humor of high order and belly laughs. But the final two acts, after Eliza (Heather Lind, in a star turn) has become transformed, pack an emotional wallop as she and Higgins (Robert Sean Leonard, perfectly cast) try to sort trough their feelings for one another as well as Eliza’s prospects. As a gutternsipe, at least she had a legitimate way to earn a living: “I sold flowers,” she says. “I didn’t sell myself. Now you’ve made a lady of me I’m not fit to sell anything else.”

Shaw’s trenchant critique of England’s class system and its limited roles for women is in full cry in “Pygmalion,” but he delivers via in a fast, entertaining story that’s nonetheless full of deep feeling. When Higgins and Pickering (the regal and comedic Paxton Whitehead) return from the society ball where Eliza has fooled everyone, they celebrate “their” achievement, utterly ignoring Eliza, who’s melted into a chair. Her fury grows until she famously hurls Higgins’ slippers at him, an outburst he finds baffling.

Leonard’s Higgins blusters through life — as Eliza says, “all bounce and go, and no consideration for anyone.” He’s brusque and peremptory to the point of rudeness, yet he treats everyone, from flower girls to duchesses, the same. He cares about little more than his work in linguistics, and social niceties seem trivial to him. Leonard’s Higgins truly can’t understand Eliza’s upset at first, because the feelings in which it’s rooted are largely irrelevant to him. But when Eliza finally stands up to him, he recognizes and rejoices in her strength, even if he still, at some level, takes undue credit for it.

At the opening of the play, when Lind’s Eliza is at her most coarse, “crooning like a bilious pigeon,” as Higgins says, you take even greater delight in it, knowing what’s coming. She’s got an accent that could bend metal, which Shaw renders phoenetically for the first few lines: “fewd dan y’ de-ooty bawmz a mather should, eed now bettern to spawl a pore gel’s flahrzn than ran awy atbaht pyin.” (“If you’d done your duty by him as a mother should, he’d know better than to spoil a poor girl’s flowers than run away without paying.”)

The prospect of this bawling scrabbler passing herself off as a posh lady in just a few scenes is delicious to contemplate, and when the time first arrives, in Higgins’ mother’s drawing room, the comedy is a marvel of perfect execution. Eliza’s well-schooled tone and pronunciation are hilariously incongruous with their content, and Lind’s delivery is a joy.

Don Lee Sparks almost steals the Show as Eliza’s father, Alfred, a dustman who, thanks to Higgins, gets a lecture tour, money and misery he didn’t have when he was poor. Maureen Anderman shows steely reserve as Higgins’ mother, who love for and exasperation with her son are in equal measure, and Caitlin O’Connell, as Higgins’ housekeeper, demonstrates similar feelings for him through her stoic suffering.

Working on a remarkable, two-story set by Alexander Dodge and attired nattily by Gabriel Berry and Andrea Hood, the cast is a true ensemble, a collection of pros finding humor, insight and social commentary in a classic play.