The first full season of Shaw Chicago-a project launched last spring by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs-will kick off with Sunday-matinee and Monday-evening staged readings of George Bernard Shaw’s “The Apple Cart,” a farce that deals with the question of public responsibility.
Written in 1929, it is set in futuristic England, where less than 10 percent of the population votes, industry and government officials are ruthlessly controlled by a syndicate called Breakages Limited and the country’s main export is chocolate creams.
“The play finds Shaw experimenting with un-Shavian forms in its free-flowing satire and nonsense,” director Andrew Callis says. “The typical Shavian elements-a well-made plot and a general fairness to his characters-are not enlisted.”
“The Apple Cart” cast includes Don Brearley, Robert Scogin, Belinda Bremner, Henry Godinez, Deborah Davis, Scott Lynch-Giddings, C.C. Cook, Jack Hickey, Susan Hart, Laurie Sparrow and Andrew Leman.
Readings will be given at 3 o’clock Sunday afternoon (and Sept. 18 and 25) and at 7 p.m. Monday (and Sept. 19 and 26) in the Studio Theater of the Chicago Cultural Center, 77 E. Randolph. Admission is free; seating is first-come, first-serve or by reservation (312-744-7648).
Shaw Chicago comes out of a tradition set in 1956 when Lois Weisberg, now the city’s commissioner of cultural affairs, organized a centennial celebration of the playwright’s birth and started the Shaw Society in Chicago, which presented a series of Shavian readings.
Future productions will be “In the Beginning” and “As Far as Thought Can Reach” from “Back to Methuselah” (March 1995) and “Getting Married” (May and June 1995).