New play at Theater Wit focuses on unlikely friendship between boxer Gene Tunney and George Bernard Shaw

Among the many, many endeavors in his lengthy and active life, George Bernard Shaw wrote plays, more than 60 of them, the most famous being “Man and Superman” “Saint Joan” and “Pygmalion,” which became the basis for the musical “My Fair Lady.”

He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925 and though dead and gone since 1950, he will be back on stage at Theater Wit in a few days when he is portrayed by actor Richard Henzel in the world premiere of “Shaw vs. Tunney.”

Though playwright Douglas Post, director Nick Sandys, and actors including Sam Pearson (Gene Tunney) and Maddie Sachs (Polly Tunney) might be nervous, there is no person who will be more anxiously excited on opening night than Jay Tunney.

He will be in the audience with his wife Kelly, their daughter Teressa (an actor, writer and producer) and, as he says with a chuckle, “the 196 cousins who will be flying in to see the show.”

Jay Tunney, you see, is the son of Gene Tunney. Post has based his theatrical work solidly on Jay’s 2010 book “The Prizefighter and the Playwright: Gene Tunney and Bernard Shaw.”

I sat with Tunney in his Near North Side apartment a few years ago to talk about the book and the play. He shares that apartment with his wife, a delightful person who was a former Vietnam correspondent for The Associated Press and later the first woman vice president in the history of that worldwide news organization.

They also share the place with Gene Tunney, who died in 1978. There he is in paintings, photos, boxing gloves and other memorabilia. At the time, which was 2016, Jay was already working with Post on the play. They hoped to have it on stage within a year.

“Well,” Jay says now, “it didn’t quite work out that way. We were about to take off and then a director departed and then the pandemic came. Everything just stopped. I thought we were done but Doug came through, found a producer and here we are. I am very pleased.

“The play is set on the island of Brioni, where my parents had an extended honeymoon and spent time with Shaw and his wife. They were all there for a month dealing with my mother’s illness and that was where my father and Shaw developed the deep spiritual relationship that lasted throughout their lives.”

It will be interesting to see how Post handles what led up to this island stay.

If you want a full back story, you can read Jay’s book, which I have previously called “magnificent, revelatory and fascinating.” But here’s a bit of background.

Shaw, like many writers over the centuries, was drawn to boxing. In 1882, before fame came calling, he wrote a novel about the sport. “Cashel Byron’s Profession” was about an Irish heavyweight who becomes the champion of the world and develops an unlikely relationship with an aristocratic heiress.

Shaw had boxed in his youth and in 1919 covered for The Nation magazine the heavyweight title bout between France’s Georges Carpentier and Britain’s Joe Beckett in London. He was captivated by the handsome French fighter and though the fight lasted only 74 seconds, he raved that “geniuses like Carpentier [are] too few and far between.”

Fast forward five years and you’d find Shaw watching newsreel footage of Carpentier’s bout at the Polo Grounds in Manhattan. Shaw was shocked to see his hero knocked silly by Gene Tunney who, Shaw would quickly discover, bore a striking resemblance to his fictional creation Cashel Byron.

Tunney was one of the seven children and the eldest son of Irish immigrants, raised in a shabby section of Greenwich Village in New York City. His father was a stevedore given to violent outbursts, which Gene did his best to escape by reading. He boxed a bit as a boy and more seriously while serving with the Marine Corps during World War I. He went pro in 1915 and became heavyweight champion by defeating Jack Dempsey in Philadelphia in 1926.

He was often derided by sports writers more accustomed to fighters whose reading habits began and ended with comic books. The usually incisive Paul Gallico once wrote, “I think Tunney has hurt his own game with his cultural nonsense.”

He was a great fighter, more tactician than slugger, and his most famous fight — arguably the most famous heavyweight fight in history — took place here on Sept. 22, 1927, in Soldier Field. In the seventh round of the fight that would become known as the “Long Count,” Tunney hit the canvas for the first time in his career. Dempsey did not retreat to the neutral corner for five seconds before the referee started the 10-count. Tunney was able to get to his feet before “10″ and went on to win the fight. (You can judge for yourself here).

The next year Tunney retired undefeated, becoming the first and only heavyweight champ to ever do so, until Rocky Marciano joined this exclusive club in 1956.

He was movie star handsome and when he fell in love, he fell hard for Polly Lauder, a beautiful heiress. They were married in Rome and their pre- and post-wedding travels were peppered with meeting such celebrated people as Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Thornton Wilder.

When Gene and Polly were in London, Shaw and his wife invited them to lunch. The couples hit it off and became especially close the next year when they spent a month coping with Polly’s serious illness on the island of Brioni in the northern Adriatic Sea.

And that is where theatergoers will be taken in the Grippo Stage Company production at Theater Wit. Jay Tunney has spent most of his life as a successful entrepreneur, investor and writer. He spent 10 years researching and writing his book and now he tells me, “My daughter Teressa has been much more involved with the play than I. We are the two executive producers and I must say that Doug has done a tremendous job.”

“I tried to stay away from rehearsals. I think I made the actors nervous. I can understand that. They are playing my mother and father on that stage.”

“Shaw vs. Tunney” runs through July 8 at Theater Wit, 1229 W. Belmont Ave.; tickets at 773-975-8150 and theaterwit.org

rkogan@chicagotribune.com