And yet, with trepidation, my friend accepted the invitation. Before the performance, I filled him in on the events that had preceded this, the third installment in the four-opera Ring cycle: The evil dwarf Alberich's theft of the Rhinemaidens' gold, out of which he forges the omnipotent, accursed ring; the bad deal that Wotan, king of the gods, makes with the giants who have built his outlandish dream palace, Valhalla; Wotan's wrath at his favorite Valkyrie daughter, Brünnhilde, for disobeying his orders not to protect his son Siegmund, who has fallen incestuously in love with his twin sister, Sieglinde-a union that will produce the boy wonder, Siegfried.

After the snarling orchestral prelude to Act I gave way to Mime's marvelously dyspeptic declaration of his plan to trick Siegfried, his wild foster-child, into slaying the current keeper of the ring, Fafner the dragon; and after the breathless arrival of Siegfried himself, with bear in tow, I glanced over at my friend. He was riveted-and he stayed that way for the next five and a half hours to the very end, when the young hero subdues Wotan and rushes through the circle of fire to discover sleeping Brünnhilde and the radiance of love.

Once again, the most astonishing theater piece ever written had worked its magic. George Bernard Shaw, a famous Wagner buff, was right when he urged "modest citizens" not to disqualify themselves "from enjoying The Ring by their technical ignorance of music." Shaw added, "There is not a single bar of 'classical music' in The Ring -not a note in it that has any other point than the single direct point of giving musical expression to the drama."

That insight goes to the heart of The Ring 's magnetism, which has made it the Met's most cough-proof draw for more than a century. The four Saturday afternoon performances that I attended, each of which was broadcast throughout North America, were sold out. The current staging, by the German director Otto Schenk, dates from the late 1980's, and it's been perhaps the most popular Ring in the Met's history.

It's also been the most reviled of recent Ring s, especially among Wagnerites who feel that the cycle's immense complexity needs to be inflected with a little attitude in order to reach today's dumbed-down philistines. The Ring far surpasses all other operatic works as an invitation to interpretation, thanks to its paradoxical combination of mythological rituals and melodramatic plot twists. Its myriad themes touch on more human frailties than came out of Pandora's box. An epic of turbulence, it ends on an admonitory note that has assumed ever more urgency in the last terrible century and in the terrible first decade of the new one: The gods are finished, they're history, and only we are responsible for what happens to us.

Like Shakespeare, The Ring has the power to transfix you with magnificent language-in this case, the all-enveloping splendor of the music-while making you squirm with self-recognition. In recent years, the most "advanced" productions have concentrated on the squirm factor, the idea being to reduce Wagner's vast vision to a scold about the evils of materialism, the evils of sexism, the evils of fundamentalism-what have you.

The Schenk staging sticks resolutely to an older tradition: Let the magnificence flow and meaning will take care of itself. It's a retrogressive approach that I've applauded for years (though, having just completed my fourth go-round of this production, my enjoyment may have finally run its course). What Mr. Schenk and the set and projection designer, Günther Schneider-Siemssen, the costume designer Rolf Langenfass and the lighting designer Gil Wechsler realized is that somewhere in this cornucopia of timely concerns is a fairy tale trying to get out. Replete with sets and costumes out of the Brothers Grimm and special effects out of George Lucas, the Met's Ring puts into the mix the one member of the human family Wagner never showed much interest in-the child in all of us.

In keeping with a house whose Ring s have featured virtually every great Wagner singer of the past 100 years (Lilli Lehmann, Albert Niemann, Olive Fremstad, Frida Leider, Friedrich Schorr, Kirsten Flagstad, Lauritz Melchior, Hans Hotter, Wolfgang Windgassen, Astrid Varnay, Birgit Nilsson and Hildegard Behrens, among others), the current Ring has availed itself of most of the world's top Wagnerians. The challenge brought out their best, and even when the voices faltered-which they seldom did-there was the Met's mighty orchestra, under James Levine, to fill the ears with wave after wave of sumptuous, expertly delivered sound.

I don't think I've ever heard a more strongly cast, more seamlessly paced Das Rheingold . Richard Paul Fink, a young American baritone of keen dramatic and vocal agility, showed that Alberich will retain all his desperate menace during the next generation. Another newcomer to the production, the Austrian mezzo-soprano Yvonne Naef, was a refreshingly warm and unshrewish Fricka. And there, once again, as her impossibly errant husband, Wotan, was James Morris, still holding his own and minus the vocal wobble he's had of late-but looking rather like the old coach who's been through too many playoffs.

Die Walkürie reunited the ageless Plácido Domingo, who brought to Siegmund the sort of Italianate lyricism that Wagner wanted in his singers (but has seldom got), and Deborah Voigt, who forged her own incomparable ring of vocal gold as Sieglinde. And, yes, we were treated yet again to the Met's Brünnhilde of choice, Jane Eaglen. To my ears, this enormous artist offers a very mixed treat: a clarion top register that becomes a wan, unmusical shadow of itself in the middle and lower registers and delivers no hint of the character's vulnerability. Two operas later, in Die Götterdämmerung , she managed to bring down the house (and, figuratively, the Hall of the Gibichungs) with those steely high notes, but by this time her ability to penetrate the unforgiving sound-mass of Mr. Levine and his troops seemed like a stunt. Brünnhilde is by far the most complex of Wagner's oh-so-pure heroines, but the only real complex character onstage was the Hagen of the venerable Finnish bass Matti Salminen, who gave this deeply unlikable villain a Shakespearean grandeur I hadn't seen before. (Earlier, he made a wonderfully chilly, cavernous Fafner.) I eagerly await Ms. Voigt's ascendancy to the Valkyrie goddess, which I suspect will occur any day now.

Siegfried , to everyone's delight, finally landed a real Siegfried in the person of Jon Frederic West. His triumph in the most punishing of heldentenor roles was a surprise. I'd heard this veteran American tenor give fine but not especially memorable performances at the Met as Bacchus in Ariadne auf Naxos and Eric in The Flying Dutchman , but neither role demands what this one so inhumanely calls for: four hours of all-out singing, much of it above a dense, high-decibel orchestra, climaxing with 20 minutes of impassioned vocal ecstasy. Short and stout, Mr. West is scarcely the picture of impetuous adolescence. His vocal timbre lacks distinctive beauty. Nonetheless, he sang all the notes and all the words with thrust and sense. He brought out the cruel callowness of the young man toward his greedy guardian Mime (powerfully sung by Gerhard Siegel) and brandished his magical sword Notung with a good stab at panache. Best of all, he was indefatigable. If he lacked the ringing splendor of the most celebrated Siegfried of the last century, Lauritz Melchior, he seemed the incarnation of our present government's heedless approach to the world's shadowy evils-a Siegfried for our time, a Siegfried without fear.

when a reedy, timid schoolmaster named Mr. Houghton suddenly declared to his

class of sleepy 15-year-olds that George Bernard Shaw couldn't write.

Perhaps Mr. Houghton, a disciple-no less-of the mighty F.R.

Leavis at Downing College,

Cambridge, was bored with his lot,

or perhaps he wanted to wake us up. But there he was, hammering Shaw's iconic

reputation as we looked up in astonishment from our dutifully thumbed pages of Saint Joan .

No one had ever done such

a thing before! Criticizing Shaw was a form of blasphemy akin to announcing you

disliked a beloved uncle. But I remember his thrilling words of protest. "Think!"

Mr. Houghton encouraged us, as a polemicist advocates passionate dissent. "Is

Shaw's Saint Joan a tragic heroine to you, or is she really a coy and simpering

starlet ?"

A starlet! No one had ever talked this way before, and perhaps my bias against Shaw began

there and then, not with a saint but a starlet.

Shaw is still revered in England,

but the English worship at his shrine less than we do in America.

The prestigious Roundabout Theater production of Major Barbara with Cherry Jones at the American Airlines Theatre

has been treated pretty reverently; at least Shaw has. But two or three seasons

ago, an admired Peter Hall production of Major

Barbara in London emptied the

theater. "They say Shaw's gone out of fashion," Sir Peter said mournfully at

the time. "And we certainly proved it."

Or, as the campy soldier cheerfully puts it in Peter

Nichols' Privates on Parade : "That

Bernadette Shaw! She's such a chatterbox!" He is over-chatty, there's no denying it. He's the only dramatist to

tell us what to think twice over: in the didactic

prefaces to the plays (which can be longer-and better-than the plays), and in

the plays themselves! But then Shaw virtually invented the modern theater of

vigorous ideas and debate-a forum for the 20th century.

George Steiner, for one,

pays fulsome tribute to Shaw's renowned wit, his crisp Swiftian prose and his

then-revolutionary causes, from socialism to vegetarianism, from the rights of

women to his lasting ridicule of war. But even he acknowledges a dysfunction in

our own climate. "We prefer our creeds to be inward, problematic, obliquely

metaphoric," Mr. Steiner writes. "Shaw's combative trust in the ultimate

realization of truth, of robust decency, of clearly deniable ideals, strikes us

as both shallow and hectoring. The shift in consciousness distances us from his

prose."

But does it? Shaw's windy

soapbox aside-a big, finger-wagging aside-there's no emotional connection. In Major Barbara , there's discomforting,

spirited debate about the morality of arms dealers versus pious Christian

charity, and there's a preening flippancy. There's the customary Shavian wit

and merry mischief, and there's a pixieish streak of silliness that subverts

Shaw's "grim absurdities" with noisy glibness. He flatters audiences, as Tom

Stoppard does when he remembers to.

John Osborne, another polemicist of the theater, loathed

Shaw in his blood, and lampooned his plays in jaundiced, high Swiftian style

during a favorable review of Michael Holroyd's masterly biography of Shaw.

"They pander slavishly to the feeble, middle-class notion of 'laughing at

themselves,' a form of theatrical charity virtuously dispensed to clowns posing

as insurrectionist dreamers," he thundered about the plays. "Shaw, of course,

played up to this applause like the court dwarf who's fallen into a tureen of

malmsey."

So, you see, old G.B.S. brings out the best and worst in us.

A tureen of malmsey! (A starlet!) But what we don't

have in Major Barbara is much

emotional depth-and, at that, in a drama that correctly prophesied the

multinational corporations of the world will rule us all. The all-powerful

corporation in Major Barbara belongs

to the billionaire arms dealer Undershaft,

and he's a wonderfully challenging invention-arguably Shaw's

best.

Shaw himself, never

immodest, wrote to the actor, Louis Calvert, who originally played the part:

"Undershaft is diabolically subtle, gentle, self-possessed, powerful,

stupendous, as well as amusing and interesting. There are the makings of ten

Hamlets and six Othellos in his mere leavings." That's about right, apart from

the Hamlet and Othello. The charming devil incarnate, Undershaft surely never

gave a toss about sexual jealousy. (He could be sexless). And, unlike Hamlet,

he's a man who knows how to kill. Killing is his calling card.

Rarely has a man been so uncompromisingly clear in his credo

"to give arms to all men who offer an honest price for them without respect of

persons and principles." His daughter, Major Barbara, is in the business of

saving souls in the Salvation Army. Her faith is in God, his faith in "money

and gunpowder." Undershaft's religion, in other words, is money. Money supports

the Salvation Army. Ergo , money can

do anything, including save souls.

It's salutary to recall that Alfred Nobel-father of the

Nobel Peace Prize-patented dynamite, which made him an immense fortune, which

enabled him to found the Peace Prize. But Shaw, via Undershaft, takes aim at

more than hypocrisy. His bold message and moral is that poverty is the only

crime.

He makes certain the

message is received in his preface to the play: "In the millionaire Undershaft

I have represented a man who has become intellectually and spiritually as well

as practically conscious of the irresistible natural truth which we all abhor

and repudiate: to wit, that the greatest of our evils, and the worst of our

crimes is poverty, and that our first duty-a duty to which every other

consideration should be sacrificed-is not to be poor."

My problem with Undershaft is that he's too persuasive by

half, winning every argument hands down. Shaw giddily makes him so convincing

and persuasive, he crushes all opposition. But look at the stagey types and

weaklings who surround him: There's his sometime wife, Lady Britomart, a bit of

a character, who's a grande dame with nothing to say; his son, Stephen

Undershaft, who's a righteous, spineless Tory wastrel with no brains; his empty-headed daughter Sarah and her silly

aristocratic husband-two dim peas in a parodiable pod. The poor (who Shaw cares

so much about) are condescended to, as the lower orders invariably are in his

plays. He writes Eliza Doolittle stage Cockney

for actors, literally spelling it out in the script: "Yus, you dessay! I know.

Every loafer that can't do nothink calls isself a painter …. "

Which leaves Undershaft's sanctimonious

eldest daughter, Major Barbara herself, and her unlikely fiancé, dotty

Adolphus, known as Dolly, who's a professor of Greek. This much I know:

Dolly gives academics a bad name. But Barbara's righteousness lets down God's

side. When she realizes the Salvation Army money is tainted, her romantic

devotion to the cause quickly collapses under Undershaft's shelling. Then

again, her subsequent reconciliation and overnight transfiguration into

tolerant realist-"life is all one"-have always seemed more tidily, smugly

convenient than revelatory.

Daniel Sullivan's Roundabout production is an uneven one

with one too many "turns" and some surprising overplaying. If it's beatific,

send for Cherry Jones! But even this luminous actress couldn't quite capture

Major Barbara's fall (and rise again). David Warner's Undershaft, however,

stands head and shoulders above everyone in a magnificent performance of

controlled irony leading seamlessly to the sustained passion of his Act III

soliloquy. Mr. Warner, the great British actor who disappeared from the theater

for some 30 years, is only now making his U.S.

debut. We welcome him back to the stage with open arms.

"TK," to a journalist, means "to come." It's a placeholder in draft copy for something to be added later.

The first page of my review copy of Richard Stengel's history of flattery says "Acknowledgments TK," the second says "Dedication TK." In other words, Mr. Stengel has prepared an entertaining and at times surprisingly serious and disturbing meditation on flattery, but he declines to show reviewers how he himself does the deed.

I'm guessing the acknowledgments will include people at The New Yorker , to which he contributes; people at Time , where he's now managing editor of the magazine's Web site; Bill Bradley, for whom he was a campaign speech writer; and Nelson Mandela, whose 1994 autobiography Mr. Stengel worked on.

Perhaps he will acknowledge that Mr. Mandela, of all people, may have been the inspiration for the book. That's a name you have to drop lightly, but Mr. Stengel knows how to strike the right affectionate but dispassionate note. Last year, he told Frontline that Mr. Mandela is "incredibly susceptible to flattery and compliments … It's a kind of unerring missile into him, to flatter him, because it confirms in a way his sense of self-esteem. So he's a master of using it and he is also disarmed by it at the same time." That comment nicely captures Mr. Stengel's subtle understanding of the flattery power dynamic.

The absence of acknowledgments may be just as well, as any discussion of flattery, much less a review of a discussion of flattery, inexorably tends toward the meta, and You're Too Kind is more straightforward than that. Though it's not in any important sense a manual, Mr. Stengel does end his book with an epilogue called "How to Flatter Without Getting Caught," which consists of a series of tips and examples. Let's give them a test drive.

Be specific . Mr. Stengel starts his book by sketching out two fascinating and fundamental propositions about flattery, and they allow him to build a work that, while lively to the point of occasional glibness, is analytically penetrating and theoretically sound. He offers a deft definition. Flattery is, he says, not just any praise and not generally empty or false praise. It is "strategic praise, praise with a purpose." Flattery is not about lying but about currying favor, which is often best accomplished by giving the object of the flattery a carefully marshaled, casually presented and unexpected but truthful compliment. (This definition is a kind of flipside to Alan Bennett's remark about false modesty: "All modesty is false," he said. "Otherwise it's not modesty.")

Mr. Stengel's second insight, echoing what he said elsewhere about Mr. Mandela, is that flattery is about status, not substance. He quotes, in succession, George Bernard Shaw and Ralph Waldo Emerson on this point. Shaw: "What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattering." Emerson: "We love flattery, even though we are not deceived by it, because it shows that we are of importance enough to be courted." (The book brims with quotations. They are good quotations, too, but their quantity is such that you sometimes think you've stumbled into the schmooze section of Bartlett's .)

Be a little esoteric . This second point provides the book's backbone. It allows Mr. Stengel to march through recorded history making broad comments about social hierarchy that are not always grounded in a discussion of flattery as such. Or, put another way, the explanatory force of Mr. Stengel's argument builds so furiously–from flattery as strategic praise, to all praise as purposeful, to all linguistic interaction as reflective of social hierarchy–that, finally, he seems to explain all of human social history by reference to self-promotion. He may have spent too much time in Manhattan.

You're Too Kind shares its unified-theory-of-everything quality with The Moral Animal , Robert Wright's explanation of all human activity as the struggle for genetic immortality, which Mr. Stengel discusses at length. In both books, the reader swims against powerful currents of theory, striving all the while to identify counterexamples and alternative explanations–which actually makes for an engaging reading experience.

Mix a little bitter in with the sweet . The earliest and brainiest parts of You're Too Kind are quite powerful. The concluding chapters, too–starting with a very good discussion of the central role Dale Carnegie continues to play in the American conception of success–have great force.

But the middle of the book is a long historical slog. My heart sank as it became clear that Mr. Stengel intended to work his way through the Great Books to illuminate his theme. This part has many of the qualities of a pretty good undergraduate essay in a required class at Columbia University or the University of Chicago. The student has picked an original and entertaining theme, but as he runs through the texts at hand it turns out that there is neither quite enough to say nor a sufficiently interesting or coherent thesis. To make up the required number of pages, the student quotes abundantly, digressing, doubling back, padding. There's a lot of that in You're Too Kind . It's not that the writing or thinking is anything like bad; it's just that there is a serious and powerful essay lurking just underneath this somewhat flabby book.

That's still something. Tell someone you're writing a book on flattery at a cocktail party, and the reaction will inevitably be, "What a great idea!" But then try to say something worthwhile about flattery and keep it going for nearly 300 pages–a different affair entirely. (We can be thankful that Mr. Stengel never made good on his proposal, reported in The New York Times in 1992, to write "a social history of sneakers in America." It followed a Styles of The Times piece on the significance of the Birkenstock sandal. "Call it déjà shoe," he wrote.)

Find something you really do like . The book concludes with an excellent discussion of "the capitals of modern flattery," which Mr. Stengel identifies as Washington and Hollywood. Mr. Stengel talks about the relationships between journalists and their subjects in both places, and he knows what he's talking about. In Washington, there is "a mutual saving of face" between reporters and politicians. "It works like this: the journalist never writes or says what he really knows about the subject, perhaps how dumb, assholic or scary the politician is; and the politician never lets on how little the journalist knows about what he or she is writing about."

In Hollywood, it's even worse. "The celebrity profile," he observes, "is a debased form; it is flattering by its very nature, even when the writer thinks he's being objective or even harsh." He goes on to discuss what he calls "celebrityophilia" with really bracing disdain. This section of the book is a nice complement to the classic Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity by Mr. Stengel's Time colleague Richard Schickel.

The fetishization of celebrity and power, and the "rampant insincere flattery" it breeds are no good, of course. But the opposite's no better: "Transparency is not the thing that will make society more decent and livable," Mr. Stengel writes. There is, he tells us–citing (afraid so) Hegel–a "heroism of flattery" that we achieve only once we've recognized "the essential falseness of society." Mr. Stengel advocates a middle ground; he believes in dispensing controlled doses of flattery, for "compassion and convenience," for "social amelioration." But Hegel was onto something too. We live in an age of superheroes.

Adam Liptak is a lawyer at The New York Times .

G.B.S. was born old, wise from the cradle, as it were. He was never modest, believing himself to be a genius, and many have believed him. But even his early comedy Arms and the Man , revived by the Roundabout Theater Company, strikes me as the posturing of a prematurely worldly dramatist of exhausting frivolity. The antiwar drama in the guise of social comedy is Shaw's way of reducing mighty ideas to his brand of middlebrow silliness. Hence the importance of chocolate in Arms and the Man or of Shavian wit.

Captain Bluntschli–a comic name for a comic kind of guy–is a Swiss officer in the Serbian army during the Balkan wars who loves chocolate. I expect it's Lindt. Shaw's jokes about the Balkans lose their charm today, incidentally. A flighty line such as, "You do not feel our national animosities as we do. We still hate the Serbs," casts a chill over the comic timing. But let it pass. The heavy-breathing Bluntschli, fleeing some Ruritanian army or other, bursts into the bedchamber of an impressionably young Bulgarian lady named Raina. Romance is in the smoke-filled air from the start, particularly when the ravenously hungry captain feasts off her chocolate bonbons.

It turns out that Bluntschli carries chocolate into battle. "What use are cartridges?" he muses. "I always carry chocolate instead." He must have eaten it on the battlefield, thus disarming himself. The smitten Raina–daughter of Major Petkoff and engaged to Major Sergius Saranoff, an oaf–christens Bluntschli her chocolate-cream soldier. And so Shaw's whimsical satire about the nature of war, courage, class and romantic love begins, and never seems to end, I regret to say.

From where I sit, on my high horse, it's difficult to see the intended profundity within the ever-popular Arms and the Man , though Shaw boasted about its heartbreaking depths beneath the light comedy. He's the only dramatist to have critiqued his own plays, lest there be any misunderstanding about their brilliance. (He was a fine drama critic, too.) But even if my view of Arms and the Man is jaundiced, and it certainly looks that way, this terribly misguided production directed by Roger Rees does Shaw no favors at all.

Arms and the Man famously became Oscar Straus' operetta The Chocolate Soldier , and Mr. Rees' most serious blunder is to direct the play as if it were an operetta. And a mannered, unjolly, Victorian-touring-company version of one to boot. Mr. Rees is well known as an actor, of course (though not for his comedy). As a director, he has a ways to go. In broadening the piece to the breaking point of boisterous caricature, he deadens its comedy and bypasses its seriousness.

This is also the most shouted production I can recall, as if Mr. Rees believes that loud is comedy (and quiet is therefore tragedy). Nor is a trill shrill. The shouting and shrieking give new meaning to the theater adage: "Speak up and don't bump into the furniture." Little wonder the wheezing hearing aid of the poor gentleman seated next to me went on the fritz. It was suffering from serious decibel overload. We all were.

As an actor, Mr. Rees has been known to lapse into a twitchy, quivering earnestness, and so it is with much of the overacting here. Let me not name the cast one by one, like ducks in a row. They all speak with exaggerated British accents–Mr. Rees is British–except for the accomplished Henry Czerny's Swiss captain, who's Canadian. No one reveals an innate flair for light comedy, I'm afraid. They have been misdirected, and so has old G.B.S.

Sondheim the Ingenue

The principal interest of Saturday Night , the 1955 musical at the Second Stage Theater, is in Stephen Sondheim before he became Stephen Sondheim. My hopes were higher than academe going in. There's always pleasure and excitement in a rediscovered musical gem, and Saturday Night has been directed and choreographed by Kathleen Marshall, the gifted choreographer of Kiss Me, Kate and the artistic director of the Encores! musical concert series at City Center. If anyone can breathe new and witty life into a long-forgotten musical and send us home happy, Ms. Marshall sure can.

But yet … (or, as Shakespeare's Cleopatra warns the messenger who brings bad news: "I do not like but yet .") Ms. Marshall has only partially succeeded in rescuing Saturday Night from the shadows. It was Mr. Sondheim's first complete score and lyrics for a Broadway show. He was then in his mid-20's and clearly destined for bigger things. But the wacky musical comedy about a group of middle-class kids from Brooklyn coming of age, with a book by Julius J. Epstein of Casablanca , was never produced. The score became Mr. Sondheim's calling card. He played it for Leonard Bernstein, who invited him to write the lyrics for West Side Story .

The new production is therefore Saturday Night 's New York premiere after a 45-year delay. It has quite recently received two college productions in London and Chicago, but that's all. We can see why it hasn't been risked here before. Even by madcap musical-comedy standards, its book is too dopey to be believed. It must have failed to ignite in its day. The book is clumsy and dated–and not too witty–and Ms. Marshall had a daunting task in trying to save the unfixable.

She has played Saturday Night straight instead–a move that's full of integrity in resisting the easier option of camp. She is charmingly faithful to the show's ace–its score–by treating the young Sondheim with deft, understated refinement. Jonathan Tunick's orchestrations and Rob Fisher's musical direction are unshowily, modestly first-rate. But the tone of sweet melodic restraint lacks the kind of musical comedy wallop that makes pulses race and keeps the stage intoxicatingly hot. Ms. Marshall even ropes in her own choreography. Again, I wish so much that she had freed Derek McLane's set of its confining, cramped steps and danced .

It's as if everyone–including the young, fresh-faced cast–is on best behavior. All is therefore quite pleasant and sometimes quite tepid. But the evening cannot soar. And Mr. Sondheim's precocious score? The boy had class, there can be no doubt. And, after all, Bernstein spotted it. A certain Sondheimian wistfulness is already there in the making. "If it's Saturday night/ And you are single/ You sit with a paper and fight/ The urge to mingle …"

His talent for pastiche, verbal polish and word games are confidently revealed in the crooner's "Love's a Bond." "When put to the test, I like to invest, but I won't be a/ Great financier …" or there's the innocent fun of the faux lady-killer in "Exhibit A" (marvelously performed by Christopher Fitzgerald): "Every little pillow has its use/ Take it from a connoissoor/ I'm the boy who coined the word 'seduce'/ Not a lousy amachoor." But the young Sondheim was still rooted in the traditional romance of musical comedy: "So many people in the world/ Don't know what they've missed/ They'd never believe/ Such joy could exist!"

"Connoissoors" of the hallowed Sondheim oeuvre will appreciate Saturday Night best, and that the existential poet of urban angst belonged to the alienated future.

He's had lots of practice. His excellent one-man show, My Astonishing Self , first reincarnated Shaw for us almost a generation ago, and Mr. Donnelly has been playing him off and on ever since. If he isn't Shaw–who is? He captures the soul of the man even for those who, like myself, find the elfish, endlessly witty Shaw a bit of a narcissistic bore.

One of the sharpest lines in Dear Liar –unfortunately, there are few to choose from–comes when Mrs. Campbell writes to the middle-aged Shaw that "when you were quite a little boy somebody ought to have said 'hush' just once."

Shaw never loved anything more than the sound of his own voice. Mr. Donnelly imbues him with an appealing eccentricity, even so. But then, the wit and humaneness of this marvelous actor have long since been apparent in his supreme interpretations of Brian Friel. The play's the thing, however, and the play's the problem.

Jerome Kilty's 1958 Dear Liar is the prototype of the cozily, safely middlebrow theater genre known as the "letter play." (Mr. Kilty, on to a good, epistolary thing, wrote five letter plays.) The principle behind them is sublimely simple, like the invention of the personalized doormat. Take any famous partnership, preferably literary–say, the Tolstoys, the Chekhovs, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion–and stage their letters. Hence Dear Liar and the love letters between George Bernard Shaw and Mrs. Patrick Campbell. It is but a short leap from them to A.R. Guerney's ever-popular Love Letters . Plus ça change, plus c'est la même shows.

Letter plays are also handily cheap to stage. You don't necessarily need a set, though Dear Liar has one (a drawing room with writing desk for her; a library with standing desk built like a lectern for cantankerous old him). You need letters (from which to read). This is the thing: The actors read. What a cheat! Letter plays aren't plays; they are readings.

They are inherently untheatrical. They are easy to do badly. But, ideally, the letters should be read and not read. The actors must know the text while pretending not to know it. They must bounce off the written page to bring the dead letter to spontaneous life. In effect, the letters must be half-read. If not, letter plays can be as dispiriting as listening to the groom read the big speech on his wedding day.

Marian Seldes, here in imperious Duch-ess of Windsor mood, has rarely been accused of underplaying. She is costumed in the first scene as if graciously attending a candlelit ball. Perhaps Mrs. Patrick Campbell was really like this, but we doubt it. Actresses playing actresses are invariably, inevitably actressy. But are all actresses, I wonder, always flamboyant egotists with grand theatrical gestures to match?

Though–according to Shaw–Mrs. Campbell traveled everywhere with her Pekingese, Pinky Panky Poo, she was never "lovable." (Her rival, Ellen Terry, was better liked.) She gushes with false modesty: "Your letters are a carnival of words," she writes to Shaw. "How can I answer with my poor whining beggars? It will be dreadful when you realize the commonplace, witless charwoman I really am. And you with so many 'great women' about you now, Saint Joan and all …"

Her effusive charm is transparent, but not to gullible Shaw. "Oh Joey!" (She called G.B.S. "Joey.") "If I could write letters like you, I would write letters to God."

But would God reply? Mrs. Campbell's correspondence reveals more of a mundane, preening mind than an eloquent intelligence (at least, as edited and adapted by Mr. Kilty). She flirts too knowingly, a tease from behind a fluttering fan. "Perhaps some day, if you are very good and behave properly at rehearsal I will write you a love letter …" Even by Victorian standards of propriety, it is all too much, too calculated and too long.

Ms. Seldes is tethered to her letters, and her reading, as yet, isn't always assured or inspired. The letters rein in her big talent, as if compelling her to behave too primly. When freed at last from the letters by Mr. Kilty's woefully imagined rehearsal of Pygmalion , Ms. Seldes is so relieved, alas, that she plays Eliza Doolittle with the gale-force impact of a Medea with a speech defect.

Mr. Donnelly fares much better in his reading, and, as I say, he inhabits G.B.S.'s spirit like a medium! He's at a discrete advantage, reading his letters from the lectern as if chained to it like a Gutenberg Bible. There's poetry in Mr. Donnelly, too (more, one suspects, than in the coy clownishness of G.B.S.).

His love affair with Mrs. Campbell was an unerotic mariage blanc . ("Lustless lions at play," as Mrs. Campbell put it nicely.) The letters aren't juicy. In fact, Shaw reveals a surprising un-Shavian touch of the Hallmark: "If I looked into your eyes without speaking for two minutes … I might see heaven." But then, he can't help acknowledging that it would be impossible for him to remain silent for two minutes even with an audience of one.

Mr. Kilty's own interjections are bad enough, cliché biopic summaries intended to create period "atmosphere": "Imagine, if you will, the end of the last century." (Are you imagining it, if you will?) "Victoria is still on the throne; England, the most modern of modern nations; the world wars are still to come." Etc. Etc.

But Shaw reveals himself to be merely passably witty: "All I ask is to have my own way in everything!" His "carnival of words" is more an excessive wordiness. The lengthy letter about his mother's cremation smacks of a poseur's second-rate party-piece concerning Death. Another letter is even a challenge to decipher.

"No; let me write; and do you pray for us both; for there is always danger when that devilment Love is at work! Ah! I wish you were with me, you'd keep me out of pickles such as I got into yesterday. Briefly …"

When Shaw says, "Briefly," you best brew the black coffee. But that awkward passage–"you'd keep me out of pickles such as I got into yesterday"–only confirms John Osborne's famously rude dismissal of Shaw who "writes like a Pakistani who has learned English when he was 12 years old in order to become a chartered accountant."

Osborne, the old rebel (and author of Look Back in Anger ), contemptuously–and mischievously–pummeled Shaw as "the most fraudulent, inept writer of Victorian melodramas ever to gull a timid critic or fool a dull public." Of all the plays, he admired only one, Pygmalion . His ferocious attack on Shaw's "vulgar drivel" created a merry uproar in London and–more to the point–a re-evaluation of the plays.

This letter play, Dear Liar , is at least, a useful footnote to the intense debate about Shaw's real talent. Even an audience of one–Mrs. Patrick Campbell–was audience enough for G.B.S. But are his overwritten letters truly witty? Are they any good?