Director Keith Scales
Keith has worked as a free-lance actor, director,
teacher and writer in the Pacific Northwest for over 30 years.
He is known throughout Oregon for his Chautauqua programs on
W.B.Yeats, Shakespeare, The Greeks, Eliot, Joyce, etc. The
recipient of many local awards, in 2003 he received the first
Regional
Arts and Culture Commission Master’s Fellowship in the Performing Arts.
Keith has been artistic director of the
Classic Greek Theatre of Oregon since 1993. In addition to directing
plays he creates new English texts and writes grants for the company. He
will direct By the Bog of Cats by Marina Carr at
CoHo Theatre
next spring, and he is delighted to be working with
Mt Hood Repertory Theatre Company!
"The Devil's Disciple is one of those plays I have had on
my personal back burner for many years," says Scales. "Set
during the latter days of the American Revolutionary War, the
play could be classified, I suppose, as historical romantic
melodrama, However, Shaw addresses themes that go beyond
specific time and place - of identity, loyalty and
self-knowledge. In The Devil's Disciple a Presbyterian
Minister becomes a man of action, a devil-may-care renegade
offers his life for another, and a young wife abandons duty
for passion. The whole thing is highly improbable, but Shaw's
play sweeps up and carries us along so rapidly there is little
time for skepticism. In the end, deeper meanings and historical
circumstances notwithstanding, The Devil's Disciple is
rattling good fun."
About The Playwright
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was born in Dublin, to poor Prodestant parents.
Shaw was educated at Wesley College, Dublin and moved to London in
1876 to embark on his literary career. He wrote five novels, all of which
were rejected, before finding his first success as a music critic on the
Star newspaper.
In 1895, he became the drama critic of the Saturday Review, the
first step in his progress towards a lifetime's work as a dramatist.
A fervent advocate of the new theatre of Ibsen, Shaw decided to write plays in
order to illustrate his criticism of the English stage. In 1898, he married an
Irish heiress, Charlotte Payne-Townshend. His first successful play, Candida,
was produced in the same year. He followed this up with a series of classic
comedy-dramas, including The Devil's Disciple (1897), Arms and the
Man (1898), Mrs Warren's Profession (1898),
Man and Superman (1902), Caesar and Cleopatra (1901), Major
Barbara (1905), and Pygmalion (1913) (on which the popular
Lerner and Loewe musical My Fair Lady was based).
By the time of his death at 94, Shaw had written over 50 plays and numerous
articles, essays, and works of criticism. He was not only a household name in Britain,
but a world figure. His ironic wit endowed the language with the adjective
"Shavian", to refer to such clever observations as "England and America are
two countries divided by a common language."
Sources:
Wikipedia
NobelPrize.org
The Literature Network
Director Keith Scales
