Theatre News Wire

 ShawChicago launches its 20th Anniversary Season with Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion directed by Artistic Director Robert Scogin. This comic fable runs October 12 - November 4, 2013 at the Ruth Page Center for the Arts. Tickets are on sale now for $30, with discounts for students and seniors. For more information call ShawChicago at 312.587-7390 or visit www.shawchicago.org.

In a tale from Ovid's Metamorphoses, Pygmalion created a statue of a woman so beautiful that he fell in love with it. Venus, the Goddess of Love, took pity on him and brought the statue to life so that his love could be reciprocated. Pygmalion married the transformed woman, Galatea, and they lived happily ever after. Bernard Shaw set his version of the tale in Edwardian London. Shaw's Pygmalion is Henry Higgins, world famous professor of phonetics, and his Galatea is Eliza Doolittle, a dirty, bedraggled flower girl he meets in Covent Garden. Higgins declares that he can transform Eliza in three months, and pass her off as a duchess, by teaching her to speak properly. His success in this hilarious endeavor leads to unexpected complications for both Higgins and Eliza. Shaw's play was the inspiration for the musical, My Fair Lady.

ShawChicago veterans, Lydia Berger Gray and Christian Gray, are featured as Eliza Doolittle and Henry Higgins. Joining them are fellow ShawChicago regulars Skip Lundby, Jack Hickey, Mary Michell, Kate Young, Jhenai Mootz and Matthew Gall. Making their ShawChicago debuts are Marcia Kazurinsky and Barbara Roeder Harris.

Robert Scogin, ShawChicago's Artistic Director, is celebrating his nineteenth season at ShawChicago where he has directed more than fifty productions of Shaw's plays. He was the winner of The Chicago Drama League's 2008 Crystal Award, and has appeared on Broadway in Shakespeare's Henry V, and Off-Broadway in A Road Where the Wolves Run and Children of the Ladybug. He taught and directed Shakespeare and Shaw at the Turkish State Theater Conservatory in Ankara and Konya, Turkey. He returned to Turkey in March of 2007 to direct Shaw's Arms and the Man (in Turkish) for the Konya State Theater Conservatory's Second International Theater Festival. In March of 2009 he staged the world premiere of his new adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts on World Theater Day in Konya, Turkey.

About ShawChicago
ShawChicago is a non-profit theater company founded in 1994 with a mission to present the classic plays of George Bernard Shaw and his contemporaries in concert readings. Celebrating it 20th Anniversary, ShawChicago is presenting three of Shaw's best know plays. In addition to Pygmalion, the season includes Saint Joan in February and Man and Superman in April/May.

For more information about ShawChicago, visit www.shawchicago.org.