The Doctor's Dilemma

...He is picking up signals from

countries where the last transmission
took place light years ago. This is how

he learns about light years and how time
equals distance and distance is a kind

of salvation. He wants to come to America,
home of the faint signal, land of stolen

elegance....

-Dionisio D. Martinez
"Across These Landscapes of Early Darkness"

A poem I read today in The Best American Poetry 1992, and not related at all to the subject of this post, G.B. Shaw's play The Doctor's Dilemma, the audio version of which I've been listening to this evening. It was produced by L.A. Theatre Works, and the first half, at least, is excellent. I think I read somewhere (maybe in one of the essays in Peter Lewis' Radio Drama collection) that Shaw is supposed to be one of the authors whose plays transfer well to radio. Not having seen this play before (I think, in fact, that Major Barbara is the only Shaw play that I've seen), I don't know if this production altered the text at all for radio, but so far there doesn't seem to be much action that has needed to be described through dialogue. Instead, it seems almost completely to rely on dialogue.

I find myself wondering if I'm missing much by listening to and not seeing the play. Thinking of The Seagull, which I saw last Monday, Chekhov's plays could work fairly well on radio in the sense that the dialogue alone can carry the play. Yet so much of Chekhov's genius is in his choreography--the way in which he balances the different groupings of characters on the stage. The movement of bodies is crucial to the play's effect, if it is staged effectively. Shaw, in this play at least, does not seem to have the same stage dynamics that Chekhov does. Whereas Chekhov creates architectonic relationships among different ages, genders, occupations, social classes, etc., Shaw seems more interested in having his characters serve as mouthpieces for a variety of comic opinions. Certainly there seems to be a variety of status (the many successful doctors versus the poor doctor who is a failure because he is the only one to adhere to his principles) and of age, but these distinctions come across through the variety of voices of the radio actors. I suppose the same could be done with Chekhov--different vocal colors to express the different characters' qualities. That is to say, I suppose that most transformations between media will find compensations for the loss of the source medium's capabilities.