Comediettina in Dallas

For sentimental and legal reasons, tiny Penzance was chosen for the first performance of The Pirates of Penzance. Cairo got the opening of Aida to christen its new opera house. For no particular reason at all, Dallas, Tex. was the scene last week of a world premiere of a play by George Bernard Shaw.

Village Wooing, "A comediettina for two voices" in three "conversations," lasts less than an hour, has two characters, A and Z. A is a misanthropic author who meets Z, a country telephone operator and general store salesgirl, on a world cruise. Against his will, by reason of her commonsense and persistence, she marries him when they are later thrown together in her village store. With no vestige of a Cause at stake, Playwright Shaw has contented himself with assembling snatches of agreeable small talk. A snatch not so agreeable:

Z: My father used to say that men and women are always driving one another mad.

A: That sounds literary. Was your father a man of letters?

Z: Yes: I should think he was. A postman.

Not often does Dallas see a premiere, let alone one by the Sage of Adelphi Terrace, whose U.S. representatives, the Theatre Guild, had sanctioned the performance. Nevertheless, Dallas' critical fraternity rose magnificently to the occasion. Observed Critic John Rosenfield Jr. of the Morning News:

"Village Wooing succeeded to a degree that will discomfit the author if he ever hears about it. The Dallas Little Theatre audience . . . blithely unimpressed by its history-making function, laughed often and loudly at the Immortal's casual scherzo and damned it as the most pleasant entertainment on the precincts since Ten Nights in a Bar Room. . . .

"It is hard to tell what Shaw meant by Village Wooing, as he did not vouchsafe an explanatory preface. You are free to surmise many things: that he sought to show up the smart-talk writers from Maugham through Lonsdale, Coward and Milne; to beat them at their game. . . .

"Mrs. Woolley 's performance . . . was practically perfect of its kind. . . . There is now a conception and a tradition to the part of 'Z' that well may be standard. . . . Mr. Meredith generously permitted his colleague to take all the tricks. ... He was to her what Georgie Burns is to Gracie Allen. . . ."

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