Robert Scogin and Shaw Chicago

For those Shavian megalomaniacs like myself who think a ShawNewYork, ShawLondon, ShawDublin, ShawBoston, ShawLA, ShawIndia, ShawJapan, etc., etc., would be a great idea, we take much heart from the existence of a ShawChicago. ShawChicago Theater Company, that is. There of course ought to be a ShawName-Your-City in every major city in the world, and we might wish that Robert Scogin, the artistic director of ShawChicago, would be the man to lead the way in realizing that, but, knowing how difficult it is to get just one of these Shaws established and maintained, he probably wouldn't be a volunteer for a take-over-the-world movement. Pity, but at least he can model for the dream, however demented it might be.

Which is saying a lot for a cotton-pickin' redneck farmer from north Alabama, as he was in origin and still claims to be in essence. But you'd never know it if he didn't insist on it, for his Pygmalion transformation seems complete. Born in Moulton, Alabama, in 1937, the youngest of seven children, later moving to Sheffield with his family, a larger town with a library he frequently borrowed from, and matriculating from Florence State College (now the University of North Alabama) in 1960, he has traveled an eventful and instructive path on his way to being a founding member of ShawChicago Theatre Company in 1994 and becoming its artistic director in 1996.

Although his first college role was as Marchbanks in Candida, which got

him hooked on Shaw, his attraction to Shaw is perhaps based more on his admiration for Pygmalion, the play that ratified his own personal transformation. Born literally tongue-tied and growing up with a thick Southern accent, he gradually discovered to what extent the way you speak conditions the life you live and set about changing himself through reconstruction of his speech, at first by imitating voices he heard on the radio. Another major impetus to that change came from a rewarding high school and college experience in which just the right teachers came along to show the way, principally by introducing him to acting, which is a way of being somebody else or at least trying out being somebody else. If you could do that on stage, you could do that on the stage of life as well.

There's another thing about that early education worth noticing, that at Florence he majored in English and minored in theater, with intentions of becoming an English professor. Even if that was partly because there wasn't a theater major there at that time and partly because he had heard that life as an actor promised a life of penury, that priority has in a sense stuck with him through a long, complicated theatrical career in which he has shown an uncommon regard for the drama as literature and respect for the playwright as writer. We lit-crit types always grumble about how actors and especially directors generally seem to think they have a license to take liberties with "scripts," as they call dramatic literature, but Bob Scogin seems to have taken fewer liberties than most, and the fact that much of his acting and directing has been of the plays of Shakespeare and Shaw may have something to do with that. Hard to do it better than the way they wrote 'em, he seems to have noticed. Since the playwrights are masters of their craft, he says, "My feeling is I don't have to write a new play. I have to figure out how to do justice to the text." And he's noticed as well that if you speak the lines as written, they've got acting built into their rhythms and cadences and punctuation and word music. Just act the lines given, that's all. Although he prefers to tell actors to be the part rather than act it.

This has a been a successful formula for him for many years, as he made his way, after college, from directing and acting in plays...