By BILL VARBLE
With George Bernard Shaw’s plays in eclipse, the postmodern person can scarcely imagine the colossus-like stature with which GBS once bestrode the world of English-speaking arts and letters.

There are reasons beyond the whims of fashion for Shaw’s relative absence from the stage. His long speeches and beautiful diction are often thought beyond the reach of American actors. His sexual Puritanism feels dated, his neo-Marxism naïve. His pamphleteering characters are often puppets. The audience for articulate characters engaged in witty debate has been claimed by the likes of Tom Stoppard.

So the news that the Oregon Shakespeare Festival would mount a production of "The Philanderer" was welcome, even if the choice itself was far from obvious. "The Philanderer," one of GBS’s "unpleasant plays," was his second play, written in 1893 and first performed in 1907. He later expressed dissatisfaction with it but didn’t care enough to fix it.

Director Penny Metropulos said she picked it because it made her laugh. The production that opened Saturday at the OSF’s Bowmer Theatre reflects this. It is an effervescent romp in which "advanced" people wrestle with new ideas, each other and their natures.

It is fun.

Philandering Leonard Charteris (Derrick Lee Weeden) is pursued by beautiful widow and "New Woman" Grace Tranfield (Vilma Silva), and beautiful and lovestruck Julia Craven (Miriam A. Laube). After much folderol with both women and their fathers, Col. Craven (Mark Murphey) and Joseph Cuthbertson (James Edmondson), Charteris schemes to match Julia and Dr. Paramore (Jeff Cummings), which could solve everything.

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Much of the action takes place at the Ibsen Club, a tony men’s club-type retreat devoted to Ibsen — so of course some of its old boys are women. It’s an amusing concept: Take a bunch of people, many of whom wish to appear "advanced" but are in fact quite conventional, and immerse them in Ibsenism, which was giving the world a New Woman.

Charteris embraces it all as a rationale to seduce but not commit. As Charteris (Shaw’s stand-in), Weeden is light, bright and very funny. His character’s disarming frankness masks (barely) a silver-tongued manipulator who at bottom is plain seedy.

Weeden makes Shaw’s challenging speeches his own with apparent ease. He has the timing to slip exactly the right comic expression into the precise moment the flimflamming Charteris is reassessing a situation and turning on a dime.

The actors worked with voice and text coach David Carey of England’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

A lengthy speech by Paramore is a good example of the demanding arc of a Shaw speech. Learning that "Paramore’s Disease," of which old Craven was supposedly dying, does not exist, he reflects bitterly on his fate in a long tirade that rises to repeated comic crescendos. That it works is one feather in Cummings’ cap and another for Carey.

Laube sparkles as the relentless, ridiculous Julia. John Tufts as Pageboy speaks in a Cockney accent that contrasts with the veddy proper English of the others. He also handles song-and-dance duties (Metropulos has added music by Sterling Tinsley to give the whole thing a music hall flavor).

Hard-core Shavians may feel the production pulls the play’s teeth. There may be truth in that. The kisses, for example, are without exception chaste pecks.

But playing for laughs isn’t the same as dumbing down a text. This is the first production of the play I’ve seen, but it’s hard to imagine it done nowadays without a light touch. Wielding his satirist’s rapier, Shaw skewers philandering as well as marriage, doctors, theater critics, vivisection, strong drink, meat and more.

"The Philanderer" ends in that very touchstone of a comedy, a wedding — albeit a strange one. It all opens out into something unexpected as Shaw refuses to tie things up neatly for us, or for these people who have failed to live out their ideals. The feeling we’re left with is uncomfortable and itchy and transcends the comic plane, and that is deeply Shavian.

"The Philanderer" will make you laugh and make you think. It runs about two hours and 15 minutes. It’s at the Bowmer through July 10.

Reach reporter Bill Varbleat 776-4478 or e-mail bvarble@mailtribune.com