The Philanderer

The Philanderer by George Bernard Shaw is A Socially Aware Comedy, Directed by Leah Bonvissuto. Prolific playwright G. B. Shaw (1856-1950) authored more than sixty plays. Nearly all of his writings deal sternly with prevailing social problems, but are leavened by a vein of comedy to make their stark themes more palatable. An ardent socialist, he became an accomplished orator in the furtherance of causes included gaining equal political rights for men and women, alleviating abuses of the working class, rescinding private ownership of productive land, and promoting healthful lifestyles. He is the only person to have been awarded both the Nobel Prize for Literature (1925) and an Oscar (1938). These were for his contributions to literature and for his work on the film Pygmalion, respectively.

The Philanderer, is a comedy where the charismatic Leonard Charteris is a philosophizing philanderer who believes that only conventional people marry while advanced people form “charming friendships.” But when he meets a self-described “new women” who belongs only to herself and is the property of no man, he may have met his match, if not his mate! It is one of the three plays Shaw published as Plays Unpleasant in 1898, because its purpose is to raise awareness of social problems With Plays Unpleasant, Shaw issued a radical challenge to his audiences’ complacency and exposed social evils through his dramatization of the moral conflicts between youthful idealism and economic reality, promiscuity and marriage, and the duties of women to others and to themselves. All this with plenty of humor! We welcome exciting up and coming director, Leah Bonvissuto to the helm.