Really Big Shaw
Culture queen Lois Weisberg says she knew nothing about George Bernard Shaw in the spring of 1956, when she turned the first page of a biography of the Irish playwright, realized his 100th birthday was approaching in July of that year, and saw an opportunity. Her main responsibility at the time was taking care of her kids, but she pulled together a two-day symposium, bringing luminaries like author William Saroyan and actor Sir Cedric Hardwicke to Chicago to speak. Shaw himself couldn’t make it, having died six years earlier, but everyone else–“his friends, his lawyers, his authorized biographer”–trekked to the Sherman House hotel at Clark and Randolph, where, at Weisberg’s urging, a room had been named for the playwright. In the giddy success of the moment, the Shaw Society of Chicago was launched, with civil rights lawyer Elmer Gertz as its president and the Sherman as its clubhouse. For the next five years, the society met there for monthly readings of Shaw’s plays, produced and directed by Weisberg and performed by local radio actors. More than 30 years later, after Weisberg had become head of the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs, fledgling director Andrew Callis approached her about starting a theater company that would stage similar readings. Says Weisberg: “He sounded so much like me to me that I invited him to do the plays at the Cultural Center.”
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Naked Ambition
To dress or not to dress is what they’re pondering at Court Theatre. The publicity photo for Hamlet, directed by Charles Newell and starting previews February 14, shows actor Guy Adkins wearing nothing but sideburns and nipples, looking vulnerable as a plucked chicken. According to the accompanying press release, “L.A.-based costume designer Joyce Kim Lee is creating shimmering, contemporary costumes, except for Hamlet, who will wear black (when he’s wearing anything at all…).”
