Bringing Galatea to Life

Two analysts who worked with theatrical productions describe their personal experiences.

As the chairman of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute annual theater series, I chose three plays, Neil Labute's The Shape of Things, an adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and Arthur Miller's The Crucible, for discussion in the 2001-02 season. They were all versions, broadly defined, of Ovid's Pygmalion myth.

These plays, in addition to George Bernard Shaw's 1913 adaptation of one person, Henry Higgins, transforming Eliza Doolittle, became the focus of my subsequent development of the Pygmalion myth for a Muriel Gardner lecture at Yale in 2002.

While researching the myth, I came across an earlier adaptation than Shaw's by W.S. Gilbert before he had begun his collaboration with Sullivan. The play, his most successful, Pygmalion and Galatea (1870), dealt with the sculptor and his wife, Cynisca, who was also his model. He had created a slightly younger copy of her, Galatea, in his studio. When his wife left for a day, Galatea came to life and immediately fell in love with her creator. This oedipalized and pre-oedipal adaptation of the myth also suggested cloning, a topic of increasing current interest. Galatea ultimately returns to her pedestal ending the adulterous mayhem her coming to life created, a satisfactory ending for the Victorian audiences of the time.

The play had last been produced in New York 80 years ago. Though I had never, at least consciously, considered moonlighting as a producer, I vowed to see this play produced one way or another and showed the script to an actor friend who I thought would be an ideal Galatea. She agreed and passed the script on to a director she thought might be interested. I had the script, with slight modernization of the language, digitalized. I also added an improvisational second ending, which would permit an audience member, during the curtain call, to bring Galatea, still on her pedestal, back to life.

The director loved the play and the saga of its production began. I arranged for informal readings of the play, bought a book on producing, spoke with a literary lawyer, and went to the Internet hoping to find some philanthropy or society that might want to fund a production. I contacted one of two Gilbert and Sullivan societies in New York that puts on an operetta monthly at Cami Hall, directly across the street from Carnegie Hall. They told me they had always wanted to do a Gilbert play and gave me a night (December 12, 2003) in their calendar.

The director cast the play with actors he had worked with and they rehearsed only once, the afternoon of the play, for the evening production. (Because the director did not like the idea of tinkering with Gilbert's ending, it was agreed that the performance would not include my improvised second ending.)

I hired a caterer to generously feed the actors and provide cookies for the audience that evening. Although the actors expect no further remuneration for such readings, I paid them each $100.

I was a psychological wreck that day, especially since I could not really hear the actors during the rehearsal. That evening after the first lines were spoken, before a standing-room-only audience, I realized they had saved their voices for the actual performance. With my camcorder, I recorded the reading, as well as a panel discussion I had arranged for immediately following the play. Phil Freeman and I presented that tape to the theater discussion group at the APsaA 2004 Winter Meeting, when we also added the second ending I had written.