https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0613-9188
As L. W. Conolly makes clear, George Bernard Shaw had no great love for America. His expressed opinion of the United States “normally consisted of a toxic mix of contempt and mockery” (2). Despite many invitations, he did not visit the country until 1933, at the age of seventy-six. This was despite the fact that during this time, the United States saw forty-four national premieres of Shaw’s plays, eleven of them world premieres, including those of Heartbreak House, Back to Methuselah, and St. Joan. The United States was Shaw’s largest source of income during the period between his first American premiere—Richard Mansfield’s 1894 production of Arms and the Man—and his death in 1950. In the period between 1909 and 1977, there were 190 American productions of Shaw’s plays. Connolly notes that between 1894 and 2020, “not a year went by without a Shaw play opening or running...
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Book Review|
June 01 2023
Shaw in America (Bernard Shaw on the American Stage: A Chronicle of Premieres and Notable Revivals)
L. W. Conolly.
Bernard Shaw on the American Stage: A Chronicle of Premieres and Notable Revivals
. Cham, Switzerland
: Palgrave Macmillan
, 2022
. xxii + 491 pages. ISBN 978-3-031-04240-9 (hardback), 978-3-031-04241-6 (ebook); $139.99 hardback, $109 eBook.
Brenda Murphy
Brenda Murphy
BRENDA MURPHY is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Connecticut. She is past president of the American Theatre and Drama Society and the Eugene O’Neill Society. Among her twenty books on American drama and theater are American Realism and American Drama (1987), The Provincetown Players and the Culture of Modernity (2005), The Theatre of Tennessee Williams (2014), and, with George Monteiro, Eugene O’Neill Remembered (2017). Her latest book is Becoming Carlotta: A Biographical Novel (2018), a fact-based historical novel about Carlotta Monterey O’Neill, who was Eugene O’Neill’s third and final wife among many other things.
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Shaw (2023) 43 (1): 100–104.
