INTERVIEW: Shaw-focused company turns to ‘Candida’
Photo: Candida stars Avanthika Srinivasan and R.J. Foster. Photo courtesy of Carol Rosegg / Provided by Matt Ross PR with permission.
The Gingold Theatrical Group, headed by founding artistic director David Staller, is finishing up its limited engagement of George Bernard Shaw’s Candida at Theatre Row in New York City. The final performance is set for Saturday, Nov. 19.
As a theater company, Gingold has a specific mission of focusing on human rights, freedom of speech and individual liberty — all while using the work of Shaw as their guide. Candida, which is also directed by Staller, is one of the playwright’s most famous works, but this time the company has changed things up a bit. For example, the original version takes place in late-19th century London, while this revival is transported to Harlem, circa 1929. The main characters are still present and accounted for, including the Rev. James Morell and his wife, Candida. Their life is thrown into an upheaval when they welcome Marchbanks, a young poet, into their home, according to press notes.
Recently Hollywood Soapbox exchanged emails with Staller about the production and what audiences can expect from the new time period and location of the story. Questions and answers have been slightly edited for style.
What inspired you to mount a new production of Candida in 2022? How does the play speak to today?
It’s annoying how relevant Shaw’s work remains today. We’re living in an age in desperate need of perspective, clarity and humour. Shaw’s Candida was written to offer us the opportunity to find all of this for ourselves with the added gift of it being a comedy. Candida: The name comes from the root word for light, enlightenment, candour, candle and candid. The play brings us a group of six people emerging from a period of their lives in which they’d shut themselves off in some way, and it’s only the configuration of this group convening on one fateful day that helps each one find their own way to forge a more personally enlightened path into their future.
It seemed particularly timely as we’re all emerging from the dark years. As with all of Shaw’s work, he writes about us: Human nature hasn’t changed since he began writing plays in 1893. We’re just more imaginatively accessorized. He made a decision early in life to devote himself to championing human rights and free speech. He sought to help empower the disenfranchised, realizing that at some level that speaks to us all. [Shaw] believed that no one ever has the right to dictate who or what we are or choose to be.
Candida was written as a response to the Victorian conventions of the 1890s, particularly as a reaction to Ibsen’s revolutionary A Doll’s house, in which Nora leaves her home, husband and children out of frustration and dissatisfaction with her life. Though Shaw was greatly inspired by the modern and contemporary method of Ibsen’s storytelling, he was enraged by the notion that Nora would leave with no hope of creating a productive new life for herself in that socio-political environment: She had no practical skills or training in which to forge an independent life. So, he created a play in which his leading lady, Candida, faces the fact that her life is going nowhere but instead of leaving stays to negotiate her terms. She also comes to the realization that she does not, in fact, need a man to define her life for herself and that she must take responsibility for herself as an empowered free-thinking and vital woman.
In a world where individual rights are daily being challenged, this hasn’t changed since Shaw originally wrote the play. Shaw believed in the individual rights of all living beings: women, men, the LGBTQ community (before it had a name), children and even animals. It was this effort at social activism that finally inspired him to write 65 plays, all comedies, to help us ask ourselves the questions we need in order to answer them independently of our family, government, religion or peers. As a brisk and bright comedy that clocks in at an hour and 40 minutes (no, I didn’t cut it!), Shaw accomplishes all this and more. So, inspired by my late pal, Stephen Sondheim, we resolved to let this particular play be our contribution to our community this year.
How has the new time period and setting influenced your directorial choices?
The choice of the time change for this play now seems incredibly obvious, but for the last few years it was a challenge I struggled with. There’s certainly nothing that doesn’t resonate with keeping the story in London in the 1890s, but it was my longtime pal and fellow Shaw fanatic, Stephen Sondheim, with whom I toyed with making time and location changes. We jointly examined several options before realizing the perfect solution was clear: NYC in the 1920s.
There was no separation of church and state in England when the play was written, and the Church of England was all-powerful. Stephen Sondheim and I were first introduced when I was 15 through my godmother Hermione Gingold (for whom we named Gingold Theatrical Group). Our common link was a fascination with George Bernard Shaw, especially his activism and humanitarianism. Sondheim claimed that there was nothing he wrote that was not inspired by Shaw. We enjoyed lively debates over the many unanswered questions raised by Candida, in particular. It was the only Shaw play that he’d considered setting to music.
Though [we] certainly had no plan to turn the play into a musical, but simply reset the play in a manner that Sondheim had been suggesting for years: in New York City at a time when the church (desperate to get people to come back for Sunday services) began sending their rock-star ministers to underserved communities at the end of the 1920s, which paralleled the time when Shaw wrote the play in London’s 1890s. At both times and places of history, people had been enjoying a new freedom of finance, freedoms and frolic. Saturday nights at restaurants and nightclubs were keeping people from Sunday morning services and the collection plates. It’s incredibly exasperating that Sondheim is no longer around to challenge us as we dive into this glorious comedy, but I feel this production has become a tribute to him, his love of [Shaw], and our long friendship.
What has it been like working with this company?
This group of actors is the dream team! Though none of them had ever worked with me before, they all jumped in headfirst: all eager, trusting and brilliant. Each actor brings such a delightfully unique perspective to their roles with insight, humour and skill that it’s difficult to imagine anyone else ever playing their characters. Each one has such a dynamic strength of individual purpose and an understanding of their own place in the universe that I’ve learned a great deal from all of them.
Why the focus on Shaw’s work to achieve the company’s mission? What it is about this writer that you feel so inspired by?
Well, here’s our official mission: Gingold Theatrical Group, now in its 17th year, creates theatre and theatre-related programs that promote the humanitarian ideals central to the work of activist playwright George Bernard Shaw, including universal human rights, the freedom of thought and speech, the equality of all living beings, and the responsibility of individuals to promote societal progress. All of Gingold’s programming is inspired by the opportunity to present and create art that embraces the fundamental elements of the joys of diversity, self-empowerment, and the chance to bring hope and clarity through art to a needful community.
For us, it was never just about Shaw’s plays, but more about why he wrote them and the activist importance of art in our world.
Shaw is well known, but would you say his work is underrated or receives the right amount of attention?
It was my godmother, the actress Hermione Gingold, who first realized how useful Shaw would be to me as I began trying to figure out what the world was about and to attempt to define my place in it.
Shaw is a writer that actually may have suffered from his longevity and fertile need to create. After successfully recreating what we now know as modern English drama, he outlived a general perception of being relevant. His plays also tend to read in a more cerebral rather than emotional way on the page. As soon as his work gets on its feet, it flies, but it so often suffers from being presented as museum pieces. He perfectly understood the need for all art to be perceived as living breathing entities that require an agenda and a point of view. Since it’s documented that he often wrote to people planning on presenting his works that they were not to change a dot, it’s forgotten that he only wrote this to people in whom he had no faith or trust. With artists whom he knew would fully appreciate his intent, he would offer them full license to interpret the plays. …
What are the economic challenges of producing theater in New York City in 2022?
Endless! We are a non-profit 501(c)(3) entity now in our 17th year. As opposed to commercial theatrical enterprises, all of our programming exists as a community service, rather than as a means to make money. All non-profits have our hands out to all of the same foundations, government agencies and private donors, so that competition is intense!
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Candida, written by George Bernard Shaw and directed by David Staller, continues through Saturday, Nov. 19 at Theatre Row in New York City. The production is presented by the Gingold Theatrical Group. Click here for more information and tickets.
