<b>DEAR LIAR</b> Spiegeltent/Shaw Fesival SpeakupWNY | Buffalo NY and Buffalo News

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DEAR LIAR Spiegeltent/Shaw Festival

A steady feature of gossip pages and TV shows is entertainment gossip, heavily centered on relationships, marriages, divorces and affairs.
In these days of social media, it�s fodder for endless talk and keystrokes.
What is seldom present is evidence of what happened.
Oh, there may be a text message or two or the court papers of a crash and burn marriage.
Seldom is there a complete record of what happened.
In �Dear Liar,� there is.
The married George Bernard Shaw and the married Mrs. Patrick Campbell exchanged steamy personal letters for decades and the combined letters even survived the Nazi invasion of France in 1940, letters between �Joey� and �Stella.�
How intimate they actually were is an open question.
After both were dead, Jerome Kilty took the letters and turned them into a history, of personalities, of theater, of lives in the performing arts.
It may sound a little like A.R. Gurney�s �Love Letters,� two performers sitting side by side reading the letters they wrote to each other practically from birth to death.
What Pete Gurney did was offer an opportunity to actors to perform without even having to memorize the letters and let others hear what life was like for a certain segment of WASP Buffalo, a long time ago, attitudes locked into aspic.
�Dear Liar� is different because Marla McLean and Graeme Somerville have memorized the letters used in the play the great writer and the great performer wrote to each other.
They staged the play, using the circular aisles of the Shaw Festival�s Spiegeltent to open out the performances, rather than just two people reading the letters while sitting together.
Instead, they move around the room, the aisles, the center arena.
It all makes for a better theatrical effort.
These are two fascinating people, an actor who had a track record of consistently making bad decisions on her career and fiscal future and a writer whose views were out-of-touch with the society surrounding them and clearly with the British theatrical censorship.
He made solid decisions on his fiscal life and died rich.
A key difference is that Shaw left behind his books and plays and diatribes because the printed page survives while few of Mrs. Campbell�s performances were filmed or had those moving images survive the vicissitudes of time.
Because �Pygmalion� became �My Fair Lady,� some of the most fascinating letters deal with the long gestation of the play, with Mrs. Campbell playing Eliza at about the age of the flower girl�s father.
These letters were certainly never supposed to be seen anyone else beyond these two and perhaps some staff, they are filled with details and gossip about major figures in late Victorian and early Edwardian theater.
The Shaw Festival is making maximum use of the Spiegeltent before it disappears, probably back to Belgium after a three-year stay just off Queen�s Parade.
�Dear Liar� is a good example of how to use the unusual space for a fascinating look into theater history, with those written letters offering a rare glimpse into theatrical life and characters.
Put it on your Niagara-on-the-Lake shopping list.

A.W.