Bernard Shaw never aimed to please-he aimed to provoke, to unsettle, and, ideally, to make you laugh at your own absurdities. His plays aren’t comfortable amusements; they’re sharp, deliberate jabs at the hypocrisies we like to pretend don’t exist. In Pygmalion, Shaw gives us Eliza Doolittle, a flower girl transformed into a duchess in speech and manner, only to find herself adrift-an experiment perfected but no longer needed. In Mrs. Warren’s Profession, a daughter proud of her independence discovers it was bought by her mother’s "undignified" choices and has to face the fact that not only the society consists of double-faced pricks but that she is herself one of them.