Does Professor Henry Higgins Have Asperger’s Syndrome?

Roundabout has a love affair with Shaw. Hardly a season goes by without a revival of one of his plays. This season it is the Ur text for My Fair Lady, Pygmalion. Leading a great cast is Jefferson Mays, who seems to play Higgins as though he had Asperger’s Syndrome. This is not a criticism — the clues are all there in the text, but of course when the play was written this syndrome and its diagnosis was yet to be recognized.

So what are the symptoms? An extremely limited area of interests that is followed with a monomaniacal pursuit. Difficulties in basic social interaction and an almost complete lack of social or emotional reciprocity that makes them seem insensitive and rude and that they are oblivious to. Language is also an area the sufferers of AS find themselves in difficulties — they may have a sophisticated vocabulary and they use it to speak at length about their abnormally focused interests to the point of boring their listeners.

Knowing this, I challenge you to see this performance and not come away thinking that this was not only written into the character (despite there being no understanding of this syndrome there have always been people like this we could recognize) but with today’s understanding, directed into the characterization by Mays. And as the curtain falls we can see his suffering.

I don’t want to reduce this great play or excellent production to this one issue — it’s just that it was so striking to me. But there was much about this production that was striking. The feminism of the play is brought to the forefront in a way that isn’t one dimensional, but captures all the contradictory impulses of men and women in their relationships.

Boyd Gaines, who is quite a stage presence, was very clearly one of a perfectly pitched ensemble of players. Clare Danes, who is called on to transform linguistically, also showed the changes with a subtle body language that communicated the emotional subtexts to those moments when she had to silently endure the chauvinism and classist assumptions of those around her.

This was such a meaty production my companion and I found ourselves talking about it late into the night — at least until we got to Vlada and the gin began to flow. And on that drama I will draw the curtain.