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The teeny-tiny Pear Theatre may not be the first venue that comes to mind when picturing a production of a lush, golden-age Broadway favorite, but the Mountain View theater company’s artistic director Sara Dean said the Pear’s smaller-scale, immersive take on “My Fair Lady” offers Peninsula audiences a fresh take on the charming-yet-sharp exploration of class, gender and society.
“‘My Fair Lady’ is generally known for big, lavish costumes and big, lavish sets, and is very much kind of ornate theater-making at its finest,” Dean said. “At the Pear, we cannot do big and grand. Everything’s a little bit ‘Pear’-ed down,” she said (the black box theater can seat only about 70 in its “My Fair Lady” configuration). Dean was excited by the challenge of distilling the show down to its essence, she said, and making it work within the Pear’s constraints, as well as to dig into its commentary on class division, which she said is still relevant today.
“I’m also hoping to appeal to folks that might have written it off as stuffy, and something that’s less appealing, or more traditional musical theater. This is a very non-traditional version,” Dean said. “The music is the same, the story is the same, the characters are the same. But the way that we’re telling it, how we’re trying to re-envision it … I think that is something that newer audiences who may never have experienced that before might find engaging and interesting.”
Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s Tony Award-winning 1956 musical, based on George Bernard Shaw’s 1912 play “Pygmalion,” features songs including “The Rain in Spain,” “I Could Have Danced All Night” and “Get Me to the Church on Time.” It tells the story of Eliza Doolittle, a working-class Cockney woman who turns to the smug phonetics professor Henry Higgins to coach her on “proper” speaking – her with the hope of improving her circumstances, him with the motivation to prove language is the key to passing her off as posh.
The Pear’s version is a story told “from the bottom up instead of the top down,” as Dean wrote in her director’s note. Set within an English pub, “it feels as if we have a troupe of performers coming to tell this story. As if they were pub patrons,” performing for an audience of their peers, she said.
Everything takes place within the pub setting, making clever use of props, and with various members of the ensemble themselves providing musical accompaniment rather than relying on an unseen, offstage orchestra.
“I find what is really delightful about our production is the discovery aspect of it. It’s a little bit like an advent calendar, or like a puzzle box, where there is a little surprise behind many doors, and you don’t know when those doors are going to open or what that surprise is going to be,” Melissa Mei Jones, who plays Higgins, said. Audience members are even invited to sign up ahead of time to participate by chiming in with a line or two (those interested can apply online).
The film version of “My Fair Lady,” starring Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison, is one of the first musicals Jones can remember seeing as a child. And though she’s played male characters before, being cast as the pompous Higgins was unexpected.
“I did not think that I would be considered for Henry Higgins,” Jones said, “so that was a lovely surprise. It’s not a role that I ever in my life considered playing.”
Portraying the privileged, often-insensitive and blatantly sexist Higgins has proven interesting.
“It has been a wonderful opportunity to discover what these, frankly, misogynistic or chauvinistic lines sound like coming out of somebody who identifies and presents as a woman,” she said.
Jones is curious to see how audiences react to her performance, and predicted that although there may be some grumbling from traditionalists, “for most audience members, my guess is that the shift is not going to be too big for them,” she said.
She, like many, grew up with Harrison’s memorable portrayal “embedded in my brain,” as she put it and, when digging into the text, found a more sympathetic side of Higgins.
“I realized that, actually, Rex Harrison, for whatever reason, I feel like kind of deliberately ignored some of the more progressive or expansive parts of the character. There are a number of lines in the text where (Higgins) talks about wanting to bridge the gulf between classes. And that’s what his hope is for teaching Eliza how to be able to speak in a higher-class accent. She’s a prototype for trying to be able to help lower-class people have upward mobility, which gives them more financial stability,” Jones said. “There’s literally a line that says … ‘filling the deepest gulf that separates class from class and soul from soul.’ And that’s what his goal is.”
In her portrayal, she didn’t want that element to be lost in Higgins’ misogynistic bluster.
“I don’t think that he is a jerk on purpose. He’s a product of his time. He is a product of a patriarchal society, absolutely, but I think there is a part of him that really is not about following the class rules, the social structure rules; that he is trying actively to rebel against that and to defy that and to subvert that.”
Despite his flaws, she hopes her Higgins can show character growth, and “warmth and compassion and care, because I do think that that is supported by the text,” she said.
Dean also wanted to de-emphasize any romantic overtones between the characters of Higgins and Eliza (played in the Pear’s production by Corinna Laskin).
“They connect, they fuel off each other, they feed off each other in a different way, that’s nonromantic, because so many of our relationships are not that way,” she said.
Bringing different perspectives and textures to theater “absolutely is what Pear’s identity is about,” Dean said. “What I wanted to tell with this story, is say, ‘No matter what, if you see this cast list, you know this is going to be a very different version. And so there’ll be no hiding that at all.”
The ambiguity in “My Fair Lady” is part of what makes it thought-provoking. Eliza’s journey is not a simple Cinderella story and her future is not clear.
“There is no safety net for her,” Dean said. “Even though … her goals and her hopes and her dreams were achieved, that has not necessarily netted her what she needs to survive.” Eliza’s struggle to navigate a social system stacked against her is “totally relatable to what many people are going through today,” she said.
Though Higgins may fancy himself an expert teacher who can mold Eliza into someone else, Eliza understands that her status isn’t a measure of her inherent worth. As she says, “the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves but how she is treated.”
The team behind the Pear’s stripped-down production aims to showcase the wit and beauty of the show while highlighting, at its core, the notion that “everybody deserves to be treated with a certain level of dignity by virtue of being human, regardless of social standing or class,” Jones said.
“My Fair Lady,” Feb. 20-March 8, Thursday-Sunday, The Pear Theatre, 1110 La Avenida, Mountain View. For specific showtimes and ticket options, visit thepear.org/whats-playing.
