Overview
Inspired by Pygmalion, Shaw’s classic drawing-room tale of language and class division, and its musical incarnation, My Fair Lady, this play tells the story of one Eliza Doolittle – the daughter of a hardscrabble Mississippi pig farmer – who sells homemade pork rinds at the Tri-Counties Fair and Livestock Show, and dreams of someday working as a waitress at “one of those nice downtown barbecue restaurants where all the tourists go.” With the support of her best friend, a sassy transgender firecracker named Miss Tiffany Box, patroness Ida Hill and her daughter Clara; and with Ida’s instantly-enamored son Freddy nipping romantically at Eliza’s heels, Delta-drawlin’ Eliza engages the services of a “Kudzu-league” college professor named Henry Higgins to take the country out of her speech and give her some semblance of class. Devotees of Shaw’s original will delight in the transplantation of Eliza, Professor Higgins, and his colleague Pickering to the American South. But this gentle, warm-hearted comedy gives us something else as well, a question to which everyone in the play must find the answer: how do we reconcile the way we present ourselves on the outside with who we truly are on the inside?