BWW Reviews: TWAIN AND SHAW DO LUNCH While Charming Nashville Audiences

Chambers Stevens' Twain and Shaw Do Lunch is a charming comedy that packs quite a lot of information into its scant 90-minute running time. In a delightful production helmed by veteran director Melissa Carelli, and starring a trio of very capable Nashville actors, Twain and Shaw Do Lunch treats audiences to an imagined afternoon affair in which the two literary lions-Mark Twain and George Bernard Shaw at the top of their parlor game-swap stories, trade quips and exchange bons mots.

Based upon an actual meeting between Twain and Shaw, precipitated by a chance meeting at a London railway station and a subsequent brief introduction by Shaw's biographer Archibald Henderson, Stevens' play moves quickly, giving us an insight into the two men whose careers were set on parallel courses in the United States and Great Britain. Certainly, the conversation between the pair is richly imagined in Stevens' script, which represents his vast knowledge of the two men and his vivid telling of what might have transpired between them during the light-hearted afternoon.

Carelli's direction is both fluid and focused: there definitely seems to be a nice give-and-take among the actors that creates a natural flow to the scripted action onstage. Performed at The Filming Station, a facility in downtown Nashville that is owned by television news anchor/award-winning documentary filmmaker Demetria Kalodimos, Twain and Shaw are given an intimate space in which to play, thus making the audience feel more a part of the meeting than one would experience in a larger auditorium.

As a result, the intimate conversations that transpire are made all the more believable because of the proximity of the performers to the actors. It's a risky endeavor to be sure-sitting that close to the actors could either be off-putting or engaging-but Carelli's deft hand is felt throughout as her actors captivate and cajole their willing audience.

While Twain and Shaw (played with skilled aplomb by Brian Hill and Michael Roark) interact with an ease only possible when you have two confident players involved, it might rightly be said that the real star of this comic drawing room piece is Charlotte Shaw, played with an infinite capacity to charm by Caroline Davis. Twain and Shaw might be the best-known characters in the three-person play, it's the clever Charlotte who gives the show an effervescence that lifts the script beyond its stagebound conventions.

Hill, playing American humorist/writer/lecturer Twain, has the most challenging role perhaps, thanks to the fact that we Americans all feel as if we know Sam Clemens, thus our preconceptions of him as a human being and as a dramatic character are well-formed. Thankfully, Hill skirts caricature and presents Twain as a living, breathing individual-a man who is as securely confident in his talents and his celebrity as he is untethered by the absence of his wife and daughter following their untimely deaths.

As Shaw, Roark is rather bumbling and self-deprecating, giving himself over completely to becoming the man he is playing. Since most of us don't have those same preconceived notions about Shaw as we do about Twain, Roark is able to create his character from whole cloth and, in the process, he presents us with someone who easily engages us with his wit and intelligence.

By that same token, Davis' Charlotte-the least well-known of the trio of personalities-is given free rein to regale us with tales, to share stories both endearingly funny and surprisingly poignant, while presenting us with a character so charming that we find ourselves thoroughly enraptured by her. Yet somehow Davis' performance remains measured, not once venturing over the top of the fine line created by her collaboration with her director and her co-stars.

• Twain and Shaw Do Lunch. By Chambers Stevens. Directed by Melissa Carelli. Produced by Scott Orr. Presented by In Another Life and Maverick Entertainment Group in association with Genuine Home. At the Filming Station, 501 8th Avenue South, Nashville. Through November 15.

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