George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was born in Dublin, the son of a civil servant. His education was irregular, due to his dislike of any organized training. After working in an estate agent’s office for a while he moved to London as a young man (1876), where he established himself as a leading music and theater critic in the eighties and nineties and became a prominent member of the Fabian Society, for which he composed many pamphlets. He began his literary career as a novelist; as a fervent advocate of the new theatre of Ibsen (The Quintessence of Ibsenism, 1891) he decided to write plays in order to illustrate his criticism of the English stage. His earliest dramas were called appropriately Plays Pleasant and Plays Unpleasant (1898). In his later plays, discussion sometimes drowns the drama such as with Back to Methuselah (1921). Even so, this was the time period he worked on his masterpiece Saint Joan(1923), in which he rewrites the well-known story of the French maiden and extends it from the Middle Ages to the present. The Doctor’s Dilemma (1906), facetiously classified as a tragedy by Shaw, is really a comedy the humor of which is directed at the medical profession. Candida (1898), with social attitudes toward sex relations as objects of his satire, and Pygmalion (1912), a witty study of phonetics as well as a clever treatment of middle-class morality and class distinction, proved some of Shaw’s greatest successes on the stage. It is a combination of the dramatic, the comic, and the social corrective that gives Shaw’s comedies their special flavor. Shaw’s complete works appeared in thirty-six volumes between 1930 and 1950, the year of his death.

KATHRYN HARRISON has written the novels Thicker Than Water, Exposure, Poison, The Binding Chair, The Seal Wife, and Envy and Enchantments. Her autobiographical work includes The Kiss, Seeking Rapture, The Road to Santiago, and The Mother Knot. She has also written a biography, St. Therese of Lisieux, and a book of true crime, While They Slept: An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, the novelist Colin Harrison, and their three children.

Off-Broadway: Tamburlaine Parts I & II (Theater for a New Audience), Hamlet & Saint Joan (Bedlam/Lynn Redgrave Theater). Other New York: The Best of Everything (HERE Arts), A Hard Wall at High Speed (APAC), The Libertine, (Kirk Theater). Regional: Richard II, The Taster, Measure for Measure (Shakespeare & Co.), From Orchids to Octopi (Central Square Theater), Humble Boy (Publick Theater Boston), Questa (Court Theater). TV: CSI, Criminal Minds, E.R., The Shield. Film: A New Tomorrow, Avenging Angel, Crash N’Burn. Tom-OKeefe.com

Edmund Lewis is very happy to be back in Cambridge, having appeared in the 2015 Elliot Norton Award winning productions of Bedlam’s Saint Joan (here at CST) and The Tempest (at A.R.T.)  Most recently, he played Colonel Brandon in Bedlam’s hugely successful Off-Broadway run of Sense & Sensibility as well as numerous characters in the east coast premiere of Steven Sater’s New York Animals. Edmund is an original member of the acclaimed Bedlam company, having acted in the original runs of Saint Joan and Hamlet (both at the Access Theatre and Off-Broadway at the Lynn Redgrave Theatre) in addition to Twelfth Night and What You Will (at the Abingdon Theatre.)  Other New York credits include Sackville & Mr. Harris in The Libertine (at the Chernuchin–also directed by Eric Tucker); Mark in The Philadelphia, Kafka in Words, Words, Words and Sir Richard Attenborough in Time Flies (Bang Theatre Collective) and the Horny Delivery Guy in 95% Chance They’ll Wind Up Like Larvae (NY Fringe). Edmund can also be seen in his friend Gregory Abbey’s web series, Marriage & Other Tragedies, as well as in Andrew Lawton’s short film Have You Seen Calvin? which will be premiering at various film festivals this year.