DAVID STALLER'S “PROJECT SHAW”

Abstract

What do Hermione Gingold and Edwin Booth have to do with Bernard Shaw? More than anyone would guess, but you might never guess if you didn't know that the link is a jack-of-alltheatrical-trades named David Staller, the director of the Gingold Theatrical Group, Inc., currently dedicated to producing Shaw's entire dramatic corpus in concert readings at the Players Club in New York's Gramercy Park. This club was modeled on London's Garrick Club and instituted in 1888 by actor Edwin Booth, with the assistance of Mark Twain and a host of other notables of the day. Booth's third-floor apartment at the club, in fact, is still there and still preserved as it was in the 1880s, looking rather like Miss Haversham's rooms in Great Expectations, albeit with considerably fewer cobwebs if equally musty air. The club has constituted a sort of unofficial Hall of Fame for actors, mostly American, whose often striking portraits line the walls on every floor, and now this Hall of Fame concept is being officially developed by John Martello, the club's executive director. A visit to the club is worth making for its own sake, never mind what event might be there, but you can visit online anytime atwww.theplayersnyc.org. One of the features of the club is its Great Hall, a mahogany-paneled, theatrically atmospheric room with a stage at the back that makes possible the acting or reading of plays to an audience of up to three hundred, an excellent venue for Staller's Project Shaw. As for Hermione Gingold, this actress-comedienne, a friend of Staller's father, took young David under her wing during his early days in New York with such warmth of friendship that he decided to name his theater company after her, partly to fulfill her own unrealized dream of having her own theater company one day. At her apartment on 54th Street, she would often invite friends over (actors or not) for impromptu readings of