Baroness and the Pig stuck in the muck
It thankfully doesn’t happen often, but there are some Shaw Festival shows that leave you dumbfounded.
As in, “What were they thinking?”
Michael Mackenzie’s “The Baroness and the Pig,” which opened at the Jackie Maxwell Studio Theatre Wednesday, isn’t just a dismal play, it’s an embarrassing one. At some point I felt sorry for stars Julia Course and Yanna McIntosh wading through this tedious muck, reciting this ludicrous dialogue.
More than a few people checked out at intermission during Wednesday’s opening. Those who remained stuck around for a preposterous ending that earned half-hearted applause and plenty of bewildered faces.
Most Shaw misfires are full of good intentions that somehow skipped the rails — and there are remarkably few of them. This one goes next level — it makes you wonder how it ever got past the discussion stage to the actual stage.
Perhaps it’s the story’s obvious (and ham-fisted) nod to Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion,” his most enduring work and hallowed ground at this festival. Set in Paris around 1880, McIntosh plays a wealthy Philly woman married to an English baron, who is heard but never seen. As sort of a charity project to the lower class, she decides to convert a grunting, feral woman living in a pig sty (Course) into her new servant.
This involves not just teaching her manners, but basic English. It results in scene after maddening scene of McIntosh saying something, and Course repeating it like a monotone echo.
Unlike Pygmalion, with its rich characters and classic, timeless dialogue, Mackenzie’s play wants to coast on clumsy allegory and laughable drama. One especially ludicrous moment has McIntosh praising a production of “Julius Caesar” she just saw, trying to explain Shakespeare to someone who can barely string a sentence together. No sooner does she describe the betrayal scene than Course raises a knife and approaches McIntosh from behind, re-enacting Caesar’s fate.
It’s cheap. It’s gimmicky. When a show has no actual drama to offer, it goes for dime store thrills.
Which isn’t to say Course and
McIntosh drop the ball — they give these clumsily written characters about all they deserve. It’s the play itself, which Mackenzie also turned into a 2003 movie, that deflates quickly and never recovers. Whether its point is about nature vs. civilization, class warfare or if a pig girl can be housebroken, it doesn’t warrant more digging. What’s worse, the melodramatic ending indicates the show was staged as some kind of hackneyed call-out to #MeToo.
There are far better shows — even ones written a century ago — that could convey that. The Shaw Festival usually finds them, but it’s like “The Baroness and the Pig” snuck in through the back door.