![]() Over the course of Doolittle's rags-to-riches makeover, Higgins quickly realizes you can take the girl out of the street far more easily than the street out of the girl.īut Shaw is less interested in what Higgins learns through his student's transformation (Higgins may be learned, but he's hardly wise) than what the flower girl discovers about herself. Doolittle reluctantly decides to participate in Higgins' experiment. "In three months I could pass that girl off as a duchess at an ambassador's garden party," he vows to his friend Col. Higgins is phonetist and social engineer. Made into more than a dozen TV movies and feature films and famously adapted into 1964's Oscar-winning "My Fair Lady," "Pygmalion" begins with a chance encounter in the rain between Doolittle, a poor flower girl with a nearly impenetrable accent, and linguist Henry Higgins, creator of Higgins' Universal Alphabet. Even with its prescient themes, it hasn't appeared on Broadway in 20 years. Written in 1912, Shaw's "Pygmalion" is a comedy of upper-crust manners and a surprisingly feminist drama about one woman's quest for self-determination. I think it's still so provocative and fresh and current." "So I am offered a lot of theater for that reason - because of that misconception - but nothing really as gripping as this ever came along. "I think people assume that I had done theater because I live in New York and I have danced," Danes says over tea the next morning (her dance performances include a recent Gap commercial). "Because it's about time."ĭanes realizes it's about time she does a play too. "Do you mind if I try without reading it?" she asks Hurley. With the warm-ups completed, Danes plows into the text, setting down her script. "That sounds rather saucy," she says, pulling her blond hair out of her eyes, maintaining her cockney accent even as she jokes about the possible double-entendre. "Actors and authors have a special set of acquaintances."ĭanes' striking eyebrows spike after that one. ![]() "A boy with a coin had a choice of moist soil." "The kids were hidden in the middle of the tin bins." ![]() "This stern learner heard from the bird," Hurley offers next. The tongue twisters aren't the playwright's but are intended to prepare Danes for the Shavian dialogue that lies ahead. "Big, blue blisters bleeding badly," Hurley instructs Danes to repeat with a cockney enunciation as a warm-up vocal exercise. "Before this, I didn't know where my diaphragm was," Danes says. But rather than balancing a ball while doing cartwheels, Danes has to juggle diphthongs, voiceless glottal fricatives and palatal clicks, even as she recites Shaw's often dense prose. The daily sessions with Hurley are the verbal equivalent of a rhythmic gymnastics class. At the same time, her character changes from a skittish street urchin into a confident knock out. Instead, Doolittle's pronunciations must pass from nearly inscrutable working class to indistinct immersion student to polished turn-of-the-last-century lady. But Shaw's play requires neither, precisely. ![]() In 2004's "Stage Beauty" and this summer's "Stardust," Danes performed with an English accent - the former with a 1600s standard British dialect, the latter with more contemporary U.K. "I really don't know if it's foolish or if it's admirable. "I know, I know, but that's my style," Danes says before she resumes her "Pygmalion" rehearsals a few weeks ahead of the play's Oct. But rather than slip into an ensemble cast of some untested new comedy in a regional tryout, the "My So-Called Life" alumna has decided to tackle one of the more linguistically challenging and iconic female roles in British stage literature: Eliza Doolittle in Bernard Shaw's "Pygmalion." It's more like "FLAW-ehrz." Or maybe it's closer to "flahrz." "I didn't" comes out as "Idin." "Meddle" is "mehtl." If you didn't have the words printed in front of you, you could be forgiven if you hadn't a clue what the 28-year-old actress was trying to say.Īnd so it goes for half an hour in the Roundabout Theatre Company offices in Manhattan's Murray Hill, as Danes and dialect coach Majella Hurley work to make sure Danes' cockney accent is as good - and, in a way, as bad - as possible.įor the first time in her professional life, Danes is starring in a play. ![]() But when Claire Danes says the word, it doesn't sound anything like that. ![]()
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