WRONG TURN AT LUNGFISH
The description is Pygmalion, of course. George Bernard Shaw’s didactic comedy worked awfully well as a model for Garson Kanin’s flagwaving Born Yesterday and Willy Russell’s heartwarming Educating Rita, and less obviously (and so more effectively) for Jerry Sterner’s brilliant and provocative Other People’s Money.
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Garry Marshall and Lowell Ganz’s new play, Wrong Turn at Lungfish, reuses the tried-and-true dramatic formula Shaw made famous in his play about a phonetics teacher who tries to educate an illiterate girl and ends up unleashing a free-willed woman. Like Shaw’s Henry Higgins, college professor Peter Ravenswaal corrects the grammar and diction of his guttersnipe, Anita Merendino; he also teaches her a few big words (like “facetious” and “fellatio”). But what Ravenswaal is really concerned with is Big Ideas. You know, Schopenhauer, Baudelaire, Keats, Aristotle, Eliot. Big Ideas that come in books written by authors with droppable names.
Toward the end of the play, Anita tells Ravenswaal that Dominic doesn’t like poetry because it makes him feel stupid. Wrong Turn at Lungfish won’t make anybody feel stupid; every idea, every symbol–including the title image, of the fish whose development of lungs marked the evolutionary turning point of the migration of life from water to land–is spelled out to avoid confusing or offending a mass audience weaned on insipid drivel like Marshall’s own Happy Days. This Lungfish swims in very shallow waters indeed.
