Theater review: Connecticut Repertory Theatre brings youth and diversity to ‘A Doctor’s Dilemma’

UConn’s Connecticut Repertory Theatre continues to be a model collegiate theater program, challenging its students and engaging audiences, not just with new works but with careful reconsiderations of historic dramas and comedies with the type of scripts that just couldn’t be produced now without being rethought and revised and updated.

The actors have to master useful old-school techniques but also sell the material to modern audiences. On the audience side, it helps that these shows are entertaining, creatively cast and generally out of the ordinary. The fall semester brought a wild puppet-infused modern farce in an age-old Italian commedia style, “War of the Worlds 2023: A Servant of Two Networks.” Now Connecticut Repertory Theatre is offering a respectful reworking of George Bernard Shaw’s “The Doctor’s Dilemma.”

The title of Shaw’s play has been changed from “The Doctor’s Dilemma” to “A Doctor’s Dilemma,” and Tlaloc Rivas is credited with adapting the script as well as directing it. The changes to Shaw’s play aren’t severe. This production is shorter than the more traditional one but only by about half an hour, and it still runs two and a half hours with an intermission.

Mostly Rivas gets rid of distracting racist, sexist or classist claptrap in the script, annoyances that have nothing to do with its plot. The adaptation focuses on the play’s central moral quandary: A specialist in tuberculosis doesn’t want to take on a certain patient because he has become attracted to his wife. Shaw rounds out the dilemma by making the potential patient — an insufferably self-centered artist who lies, cheats and steals — as vile as possible, and the wife as innocent as possible. The doctor doesn’t suffer in silence, he has friends to share his moral quandary with. His situation boils down to two thoughts: “What shall I do?” and “I can’t help how I feel.”

The actors are in their early 20s playing characters that could be played by actors two or three times that age. Sometimes, such casting limitations can take you right out of the experience, but here the youthfulness onstage glows with idealism and innocence, making the moral arguments that much more reasonable, as if these characters are starting to figure out, and perhaps change, the world around them through their values and choices.

The early 20th-century tone is set subtly. The preshow and intermission music is from Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, the popular musical social satires that convulsed London in the mid-to-late 19th century and stopped being created around the same time that Shaw was beginning to hit his stride with plays like “Arms and the Man.” The Gilbert and Sullivan connection helps suggest the world that Shaw was coming out of, but it also looks to his future. There’s a casual reference to the Fabian Society, a progressive political organization that Shaw was an early member of.

Phrases like “You have such a dazzling cheek” and the doctor’s utterance that “I am a quack, a quack with a qualification” come from the original Shaw. Rivas adds terms like “bury the lede” and “The Greatest Show on Earth” which are not in the original script but true enough to its time period. There are added references to Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” and “Macbeth.” One of the characters is given a nickname, “Trixie.” Some of this is as superfluous as it sounds, but it perks up your ears occasionally amid some of the drier Shawspeak.

The set design is simple until it isn’t. We are greeted with an empty circular platform within an equally empty circular platform. But within seconds of the play starting, the platforms are filled with antique doctor’s office furniture and subsequent scene changes include a messy artist’s studio and the courtyard outside a fancy party. It isn’t until well into the show that we are surprised to see that the stage can revolve. Like Rivas’ script adaptation, Zach Farmer’s scenic design gets the job done expertly and cleverly without drawing too much attention to itself.

The cast is uniformly charming. A lot of the male roles in the original have been turned into female roles, and it’s an improvement since it allows for varied perspectives rather than Shaw’s stolid group of yes-men. There’s also racial diversity. There are also some smart line readings that really refresh the wordy dialogue.

As Sir Colenso Ridgeon, the doctor with a dilemma, Carlos Fruzzetti is serious without being intense. He’s a likable medical professional who gets romantic without getting goofy or sappy. As the crass artist Louis Dubedat, Ian Rothauser comes off as a bratty philosophy student, which is a lot of fun to watch with an audience full of college students.

As Dubedat’s wife Jennifer, Kaitlyn Oliva gets a spectacularly campy and very effective entrance, bathed in soft light and with harps playing. But she (with Rivas’ textual help) builds the thankless role of a love object in an archaic overly formal patriarchal society into a fully expressive self-motivated woman who is given a real chance to share her thoughts about marriage, social obligation, art and life.

Of the supporting cast, Morgan Hrymack, Siommara Guadalupe-Hill and Weimy Montero Candelario are particular standouts, their doctor/friend characters so neatly rethought as strong-minded female colleagues of Ridgeon’s that they enliven every scene they’re in. Donte Warren as Sir Ralph Bloomfield Bonington struts about exactly like you want someone with that overlong name to strut, and gets some genuine laughs with his eccentricities. Lily O’Neil brings traditional British comedy tropes — the cockney accent, the bustling busybody gestures — to the maid Emmy, to good advantage, though the production has problems bringing that type of comic energy to any other scenes. As the medical student Redpenny, a minor character who has a lot to do in the play’s first scene but who disappears after that, Mark Sadowski uncannily realizes Shaw’s description of Redpenny as “a wide-open-eyed, ready, credulous, friendly, hasty youth with his hair and clothes in reluctant transition from the untidy by to the tidy doctor.” There is also Garrett LaBranche and Czarissa Moreno in two small but pivotal roles that twist the plot in new directions.

Like most Shaw plays, there’s a long drawn-out debate at the center of “A Doctor’s Dilemma” but also plenty of action and humor, even a death scene.

There’s a lot of heavy discussion in “A Doctor’s Dilemma.” Endless diatribes and emotional handwringing are a Shaw trademark. Rivas adds beautifully crafted sight gags with a feather duster and a camera to break up the tedium. Costume designer Adrianne Williams helps out with some over-the-top hats. It makes it easier to concentrate on a speech when you can’t take your eyes off the speaker’s head.

Reinvigorating Shaw can be a challenge, and some of his more than 60 plays aren’t worth the effort. This one is, and the dedicated director/adaptor, cast and designers have reframed it so that it’s both argumentative and fun.

“A Doctor’s Dilemma” by George Bernard Shaw, adapted and directed by Tlaloc Rivas, runs through Saturday at Connecticut Repertory Theatre’s Nafe Katter Theatre, 802 Bolton Rd., Storrs. Remaining performances are Wednesday and Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m. and Saturday at 2 p.m. $10-$35. crt.uconn.edu.