Twenty Years, 65 Plays, and the Man Who Won’t Let Shaw Fade Away
David Staller (left) is the founding artistic director of Gingold Theatrical Group, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary of producing works by George Bernard Shaw, pictured here in 1936. Staller photo: Genevieve Rafter Keddy / Shaw photo: Wikimedia Commons.
In 1965, when David Staller, the founding artistic director of New York’s Gingold Theatrical Group, was ten years old, the famed and eccentric stage and screen actress Hermione Gingold—his godmother—sent him a copy of George Bernard Shaw’s play Man and Superman, an idea-driven, sharp-toothed comedy about love and marriage. She wanted him to “start asking more interesting questions.”
Gingold was a wit, an activist, and a grandiloquent comedian known for her roles in movies like 1958’s Gigi and Bell, Book and Candle. In 1973, she starred in the original Broadway production of Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music.
She had also known Shaw, who died in 1950, at the age of 94. Gingold herself passed away in 1987.
I’ve known Staller for ten years. We met as groomsmen for a mutual friend, a theater critic. For years we’ve bumped into each other in theater lobbies and hugged the way acquaintances who are fond of each other do.
Gingold Theatrical Group, which exclusively produces Shaw’s plays, turns 20 this year, and I’ve made sure to congratulate him on this accomplishment, which it very much is. America’s political and cultural priorities are in dramatic flux, save for one: an indifference, at best, and at worst, an outright hostility to funding the arts.
To celebrate the 20th anniversary, Gingold is staging a full production of Pygmalion—the first time his company has tackled the play.
Staller recently shared with me, offhandedly, as is his way, the story of a legendary reading of Pygmalion hosted by Hermione Gingold in the sitting room of her midtown apartment. For years, in the 1970s and ’80s, she’d host a Shaw-obsessed salon fueled by tea and cocktails.
“The doorbell rang, and it was Maureen Stapleton and Helen Hayes and Anita Loos and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and George Rose and Marian Seldes and Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin,” Staller recalled. The doorbell rang again, “and it was Laurence Olivier and Joan Plowright, who announced that they would play Higgins and Eliza.”
“Everyone was getting wildly drunk, and Olivier was sprawled out on the floor, and Joan Plowright suddenly decided we were going to switch roles. That was my first introduction to the idea that there’s no right or wrong way to do any of this.”
And by “this,” he meant theater. Good news for fans of Shaw and human rights: decades later, Staller found his own way.
“Life isn’t about finding yourself,” said playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw. “Life is about creating yourself.”
And Staller, a self-described “loner,” born in Illinois and then shipped off to New York and educated in London, has created himself. The cultures of both the Land of Lincoln and Blighty imprinted themselves on the man: he is warm and unpretentious, like all the best Midwestern intellectuals, and mannered and unflappable, like anyone who’s rubbed elbows with gentlemen of the realm.
“I made a conscious decision, as I had learned Shaw had done, to create this persona for myself of someone who is confident. Shaw had also been exactly the same, shy and nonverbal, and he created this persona of GBS.”
Staller is tall and gentle. He carries himself with poise, as any dancer would—which he once was, with the Joffrey Ballet—and commands a room with easygoing purpose. He is an actor and a director, after all, as well as a grinning, winking fundraising machine, what one must be to run a theater company.
Especially a company dedicated to the works of a playwright who scribbled 65 plays over his long life, but whose primary claim to fame is writing Pygmalion, the play that inspired 1956’s hit musical My Fair Lady. The former is a sly, fast-paced comedy about class and identity, and the latter is a funny romance with nice songs.
To hear Staller describe his transformation from a shy, corn-fed boy to a cosmopolitan polymath, a graduate of NYU, an accomplished cellist and professional actor who rubbed elbows with the stars of Broadway, including Stephen Sondheim and Pearl Bailey, is like listening to a fairy tale—only the person telling the story sounds shocked that it ever happened. Staller is respectful when he drops names, and painfully self-aware that his theatrical journey has been blessed.
His ambitions, at first, were modest. “I wanted to be a working actor.”
That journey began as a teenager at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago. Then it led to Los Angeles and, eventually, Broadway, where he made his debut in the 1975 revival of Hello, Dolly! starring Pearl Bailey.
It makes sense, then, that a man who willed himself into being would go on to create a theater company inspired by a man who championed reinvention.
At first, Staller pitched his idea for a Shaw-focused company to “everyone I knew who had a theater company.” But no dice. Eventually, he decided to build it himself.
“I will do everything. I will adapt the plays, I will cast them, I will direct them.” He created a nonprofit theater without knowing how to do that. “I went and took a couple of seminars, and when I got on the phone to incorporate, they said, ‘Well, you gotta have a name.’
“I thought, we’re only gonna do this for six months or a year at the most, I don’t know. Call it Gingold Theatrical Group, as a tribute to Hermione. Okay, well, that was 20 years ago.”
“At first, Staller pitched his idea for a Shaw-focused company to ‘everyone I knew who had a theater company.’ But no dice. Eventually, he decided to build it himself. ‘I will do everything. I will adapt the plays, I will cast them, I will direct them.’ He created a nonprofit theater without knowing how to do that.”
The Gingold Theatrical Group was born in 2005, during the chaos of the Bush administration—recently reelected—a fragile moment in history when the country was eager to fight multiple, dishonestly conceived wars of vengeance.
It’s easy to forget those tumultuous years while living through another tumultuous era, but in 2005, the American government steamrolled humanity, torturing alleged terrorists and questioning the patriotism of any US citizen who dared ask questions.
Staller reacted to this political reality by leaning into his love of actors and theater, and the kind of art that deeply moved him. He decided to stage the works of Shaw, who wrote exhaustively about human rights in each and every one of his comedies. He celebrated the individual.
Shaw was an antidote to the inhumanity of the moment.
According to Staller, Shaw was “an activist artist” whose plays provoked “peaceful discussion.” Shaw “lived his life to help empower the disenfranchised,” Staller says. “He devoted himself to fighting for human rights and free speech.”
Staller directed staged readings of Shaw’s plays every month for years, many at the legendary Players club near Gramercy Park, and multiple full productions starring veteran actors soon followed. For twenty years, Staller has produced and directed entire Shaw festivals, symposiums, concerts with music inspired by Shaw, and a new-play development series. Twenty years. The Gingold Theatrical Group outlived George Bush’s reign by sixteen years, and the hope—and it’s a sincere hope—is that Staller and Shaw continue long after this current regime has crumbled and faded.
Today, Staller is busy with rehearsals for Pygmalion.
A week prior, there was an invite-only reading of the work with the cast, which included Mark Evans as Henry Higgins and Synnøve Karlsen as Eliza, in her New York stage debut. Matt Wolpe plays Alfred Doolittle, Eliza’s silver-tongued, lower-class louche of a father, a juicy, crowd-pleasing role that Hermione Gingold played during that boozy, informal reading decades before.
From day one, Staller wants his cast to coalesce, to vibe, as the kids say, and to form a “family dynamic.”
“The first three days of rehearsal are about connecting with each actor individually to alleviate nervousness.”
As a director, he serves as a steward of sorts. “I help to guide the cast as a group and as individuals toward finding their truth. And finding the truth is the most important step for any play in any rehearsal process.”
Staller is nonchalant when talking process, which is what happens when you know what you’re doing. “I try to inspire people to discover new elements of who they are in the play.”
This production at Theatre Row’s Theatre Five promises to uphold Staller’s—and Gingold’s—reputation as a company faithful to Shaw’s words, while mining his texts for new and surprising meanings.
Lizan Mitchell, Mark Evans, Synnøve Karlsen, and Carson Elrod in Pygmalion at Theatre Row. Photo: Carol Rosegg.
Pygmalion is about a man who believes you are what you say, not what you do or feel, and tries to create a somebody from a nobody—a well-behaved, well-spoken, freshly bathed woman from a filthy working wench. This man, Henry Higgins, is educated and ignorant at the same time, brilliant and devoid of imagination or emotional depth.
The play itself is named for the Greek myth about Pygmalion, a man who carved his ideal woman out of marble, only to have the goddess Aphrodite bring her to life.
Higgins is a wonderful comedic character, as uncompromising and ultimately buffoonish as Alceste from Molière’s The Misanthrope or Norman Lear’s cantankerous racist, Archie Bunker, from the 1960s half-hour comedy All in the Family.
Shaw skewers the whole concept of class—the idea that society can be structured via the lottery of birth—a reality that the British both embrace and disdain, and one that Americans traditionally enjoy pretending doesn’t exist, even while the chasm between the la-di-da haves and the paycheck-to-paycheck have-nots grotesquely widens every year, like a slow-motion wound opening.
Shaw speaks to the London of 1912 and the New York of 2025. He writes for a society flattened by the inhumanity of industrial progress and, unknowingly, for our age, which is being bulldozed by different technological revolutions. He saw, even then, how capitalism and random, unfair hierarchies dim the human light. That’s why he wrote a character like Eliza Doolittle, who possesses as much talent as any of the men who dismiss and demean her.
She learns a few party tricks, polishes her vowels, but she still burns as brightly as she did in the gutter. It’s an unexpectedly marvelous play about the act of self-creation that chugs along at top speed, like a steam-powered locomotive.
George Bernard Shaw casts a long shadow over English-speaking theater—he’s one of the greats—even if his work isn’t quite in fashion these days. During the height of his powers, he was among the most famous writers of his time. Pygmalion (1912) might be what he’s best known for, but his plays Candida (1887), Man and Superman (1902), and Major Barbara (1905), a droll satire about the elite and their morals, were also praised after their premieres.
The man even won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925, an honor he famously attempted to decline.
Why? He despised prizes. One of his more famous quotes from that episode is: “I can forgive Alfred Nobel for inventing dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.”
An iconic, even aristocratic, thing to say, but he was not to the manner born. Shaw himself was very much a creation—as if he carved himself from ivory—raised, along with a sister, in a lower-middle-class Protestant family in Dublin, Ireland, the son of a drunk and a mother who sang and taught music.
“I can forgive Alfred Nobel for inventing dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.”
One reason Shaw isn’t produced in New York City as much as his contemporaries is that his work is distinctly British, a mix of Victorian and Edwardian sensibilities. His voluminous body of work—over 60 full-length plays—is either set in turn-of-the-century England or in the distant past, such as ancient Rome, and all feature his trademark language: elegant, precise, layered, thoughtful. Pygmalion’s adaptation into one of musical theater’s great classics notwithstanding, Shaw’s plays are difficult to update or recontextualize because so many are rooted in specific historical contexts, even if his characters and their foibles remain universal.
Shaw’s contemporaries, meanwhile, are produced. Last year on Broadway, Sarah Snook from HBO’s Succession starred in a bravura one-woman adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Two of Henrik Ibsen’s social dramas have enjoyed recent adaptations, both reimagined for present-day theatergoers by playwright Amy Herzog: a 2023 revival of A Doll’s House starring Jessica Chastain, and another celebrity-led production of An Enemy of the People—the second big-budget New York production of that play in five years.
Also, last year, Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya was staged at Lincoln Center starring Steve Carell. Chekhov’s timeless tale of upper-middle-class ennui is much on the collective mind: this past spring, Andrew Scott starred in his own wide-eyed and intense one-person Vanya. Unlike Shaw, however, Wilde, Ibsen, and Chekhov can withstand reinvention. These plays can all be modernized. Shaw, on the other hand, seems trapped in his own time.
The most recent Broadway production of a Shaw play was 2018’s Saint Joan, starring Condola Rashad in the title role, and directed by Daniel Sullivan. Reviews of the three-hour play were mixed (one critic called it “talk-heavy”), and the box office was underwhelming, but Rashad earned a Tony nomination.
In Staller’s hands, maybe a revival of Saint Joan would have been received differently. Maybe. Theater kids love to chew on maybes. After all, he has an off-the-cuff yet considered opinion about Saint Joan, as he does most of Shaw’s works (which isn’t surprising, since he plays the part of gentleman scholar/smooth-talking showman so well).
Top left: Staller and frequent collaborator Marian Seldes; Staller on stage; Staller directing Talene Monahon and Victor Slezak. Photos: Genevieve Rafter Keddy and Maya Barbon.
“Every one of his plays is a comedy,” said Staller. “Even Saint Joan, before they light the match, is a very funny, ironic play. The men in that play are hysterically entertaining. The political and religious manipulations, the maneuverings, using her as a scapegoat.”
Still, one wonders if his politically charged comedies about the citizens of a ripe empire lurching toward its doom might be of some wider interest to modern American audiences.
Why isn’t Shaw produced? His plays are misunderstood, Staller says. “There’s a misperception of his plays as overly cerebral and non-emotional.” When, in fact, according to Staller, they’re “so accessible. Pygmalion is a comedy. It’s a sitcom. It’s about a bunch of very real people struggling.”
Shaw is taught in theater schools, but he’s unknown to the uninitiated. He must be patiently explained to civilians. It’s too bad he’s not staged more often, because his works speak for themselves.
One must imagine Shaw as he was: full of energy and hope, with bushy white eyebrows and a wizard’s beard. He was a writer, touched by fire, and a radical, yes, but also a lifelong pacifist. Staller adds that Shaw was a feminist, too. “There are photos of hundreds of women marching for women’s rights, holding up ‘Votes for Women’ signs—and he’s the only man you know.”
He was also a traditionalist who loved actors, first and foremost, and the act of reading plays aloud together. “The tradition of actors reading together dates back to the 17th century, helping them fuse as humans and artists,” Staller said.
Shaw “lived his life to help empower the disenfranchised ... devoted himself to fighting for human rights and free speech,” says Staller. “What Shaw was writing was an encouragement to all of us—to question everything, to challenge everything, to never let anybody define for you who you are, who you wanted to be.”