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Shaw’s 1933 comedietta concerns three conversations between two characters — writer Z and shopgirl A. The unlikely pair meets on board the Empress of Patagonia, a pleasure ship, although it’s only A who’s on board for pleasure. Full of life and questions, the inquisitive, energetic young woman (played by Tracy Penner) bombards her fellow passenger (Graham Ashmore) with inquiries about his profession, life and other more trivial matters. But he has no time to talk or to listen, as he’s busy writing guide books, determined to meet a deadline. Z’s disinterest doesn’t deter A, she just keeps hammering and yammering away. Oh, she knows it’s annoying but, as she points out, it’s also a nuisance when one doesn’t want to talk. When Z finally asks her a question, she replies "we’re getting On, aren’t we?"

Remarks like that make for a funny little story, however, what Village Wooing is about isn’t exactly clear. The couple’s relationship completely unsentimental one moment, weirdly romantic the next. Shaw gets in his usual tropes — commentary on politics, gender roles and economics — but if the play has an underlying point, I couldn’t find it. However, not completely understanding didn’t exactly bother me. In fact, it made Village Wooing all the more intriguing, a still-thinking-about-it-a-week-later kind of piece.

Also interesting is the play’s set. Zone 41 puts Shaw’s script in the middle of Eric Lesage’s Re:Definition installation at RAW Gallery. Ashmore and Penner move between the artist’s panels, which were created by weaving together strips of the 1956 Webster’s Encyclopedic Dictionary. I’m not sure if the set symbolizes Shaw’s rearrangement of the alphabet (the Shavian alphabet), a web (the play contains a line regarding "the spider and the fly") or the somewhat disjointed nature of the piece, but again, it’s something to think about.