THE DOCTOR’S DILEMMA
By George Bernard Shaw. Directed by David Wheeler. Set design by Riccardo Hernandez. Costumes by Catherine Zuber. Lighting by John Ambrosone. Sound by David Remedios. With Sarah deLima, Scott Draper, John Feltch, Remo Airaldi, Jeremy Geidt, Ken Cheeseman, Will LeBow, Alvin Epstein, Rachael Warren, Sean Dugan, Laura Napoli, Frederick Hood, and Nick Newell. Presented by the American Repertory Theatre at the Loeb Drama Center, in repertory through March 14.

George Bernard Shaw takes aim at the medical profession in The Doctor’s Dilemma, and 95 years later the shot still resonates. How apt, then, that at the American Repertory Theatre, in Riccardo Hernandez’s glassy set design, the play unfolds before a large reflecting wall bearing a logo that suggests both a blue cross intersecting a blue shield and the criss-crossed sights of a gun. The Edwardian docs in tails and top hats, coming and going in the icy, floating, postmodern environs, stretch Shaw’s provocative trifle across the century like a tourniquet. For reasons of his own, the author called the largely comic play a “tragedy.” But the further we go down the road of privately administered, money-hemorrhaging health care, the more prescient his label seems.

Actually, Shaw was a friend, albeit a combative one, of doctors — but not of a pre-National-Health-care system that made it in the physician’s best interest to diagnose internal disaster and then endeavor to remedy it as expensively as possible. “That any sane nation, having observed that you could provide for the supply of bread by giving bakers a pecuniary interest in baking for you, should go on to give a surgeon a pecuniary interest in cutting off your leg, is enough to make one despair of political humanity,” the author declares at the top of the play’s lengthy Preface. Of course, a great deal made Shaw despair of political humanity. But in the case of this particular crucible, the doctor is in.

The Doctor’s Dilemma — a mix of Shavian provocation, medical satire, and romantic comeuppance — is not Man and Superman. Neither is David Wheeler’s staging as passionately smart as his 1997 staging of Shaw’s eloquent to-hell-and-back argument for the Life Force was. But the gently enjoyable production sports a cocked eyebrow and a tender heart, and several of the medical caricatures are spot-on.

The “choice” facing Sir Colenso Ridgeon is not that of current health-care parlance. Ridgeon has discovered a cure for tuberculosis that rests on keying inoculation to something that sounds like a cross between a hormone and a breakfast spread. (“Opsonin,” he explains to a colleague, “is what you butter the disease germs with to make your white blood corpuscles eat them.”) Ridgeon has a limited number of vacancies at his medical Lourdes, however, and must decide between offering treatment to a decent, impoverished (and, in the ART staging, elderly) fellow physician or to an artistically gifted young scoundrel. The matter is complicated by middle-aged bachelor Ridgeon’s attraction to the talented cad’s “arrestingly good-looking” wife. In other words, the god he’s playing is less disinterested Yahweh than Zeus ogling Leda.

“All professions,” remarks one of the play’s docs, “are conspiracies against the laity.” And Shaw, in addition to debunking medical omniscience and conventional morality, introduces an amusing set of conspirators here. Ridgeon, played here with a subtle combination of dash and discombobulation by newcomer John Feltch, is no quack. And harrumphing old Sir Patrick Cullen, a cakewalk for Jeremy Geidt, has been around long enough to be dubious of the variously self-interested medical pontifications of his colleagues. But Shakespeare-splicing gentleman’s physician Sir Ralph Bloomfield Bonington, whose sonorous absurdities are mouthed by Will LeBow with pompous sincerity, is dangerously cavalier in his attacks on disease, juggling vaccines willy-nilly. And Sir Cutler Walpole, to whose surgical monomania Ken Cheeseman brings a rakish energy, thinks the cure for everything from TB to toothache is the removal of the patient’s “nuciform sac.” Add to these Remo Airaldi’s breezy German-Jewish doctor, whose secret is a “cure guaranteed,” and Alvin Epstein’s alarmingly teetering Blenkinsap, who has grown poor in the service of a poor clientele, and Shaw has assembled a motley medical army.

But for Wheeler, the play’s heart is in the romance of cheekily unprincipled consumptive genius Louis Dubedat and his fiercely devoted wife, Jennifer, and in what the director terms the “anti-romance” of Jennifer and Ridgeon. The usually discerning doc mistakes the beautiful young woman’s urgent interest in securing his services, which renders her vulnerable to him, for a spark that, arguably, sends ethics and objectivity up in flames.

Wheeler plays up the contrast between the somber, myopic docs and the artist and his muse, whom costume designer Catherine Zuber garbs in sensuous colors and whose mutual attraction Wheeler heats up. In a telling moment, Ridgeon decides to preserve Jennifer’s “hero,” at the expense of her spouse, after witnessing her anger and hurt upon discovering Louis’s sketch of another woman. At the ART, Sean Dugan, barefoot and I Claudius–coiffed, is a boyish, brazen, if hardly Byronic Louis, whose tragicomic death scene mixes audacity with Dark Victory. And Rachael Warren is determined and comely, if somewhat one-note, as Art-championing Jennifer, whom Shaw empowers, in the end, to give Science a taste of bitter medicine.