Word association: What is the first word you think of when someone says...Shaw? The answer may well be “words.”

Or as Eliza Doolittle says/sings in PYGMALION/MY FAIR LADY, “Words! Words! WORDS!”

In ENGAGING SHAW, a play about George Bernard Shaw now on display at the Old Globe Theatre, John Morogiello has nailed together excerpts from Shaw’s work (and that of some friends) to show the famously eccentric playwright at what might be considered his single most human moment, when he decided to marry.

The very air in the Globe’s White Theatre crackles with a connoisseur’s collection of Shavian wit and ego as 40-year-old politician/pamphleteer/critic is just about to blossom into the playwright of the age. He is the summer house-guest of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, fellow English Socialists who founded the London School of Economics, themselves riding a gathering wave of fame. The arrival of each post brings new developments and all seems possible, even romance.

Well maybe not romance, exactly. These are, after all, late Victorians sworn to social reform and disdainful of encumbering conventionality. The fact that Beatrice Webb is trying to find a wife for Shaw is less romantic that politically expedient. And this Charlotte Payne-Townshend not only is smitten with the Socialist cause but also a delightfully wealthy spinster. A plot thickens. And, a year later, she’s typing his manuscripts in laborious two-finger style as he dictates ever longer prologues to his printed plays while they continue to argue about their relationship.

But all this brilliant creativity has come at a price. Celibacy hangs over the shared work-table like a dusty shroud. There is a certain excess of billing and cooing by the Webbs but their actual marital relations take place each Saturday, right after he’s wound the clock. Payne-Townsend is widely on record as a celibate with no intention of marrying and Shaw himself revels in a philandering reputation largely a product of his imagination.

”Is sex pleasurable?” she timidly asks, after they’ve gotten to know each other well. “Yes,” he answers, “if I remember correctly.”

The play is mostly elaborate dodge-ball among four ambitious, middle-aged, middle-class exhibitionists, one of whom is a genius. The language is florid and the gaming is quaint but the game itself is as old as the human genome. Eventually Shaw succumbs, but not until he can find reassurance that a sexless marriage is itself the ultimate in unconventionality.

Rod Brogan is a fine broth of a lad as Shaw, tossing beautifully rounded witticisms about like Mardi Gras souvenirs. He’s like a non-languid Oscar Wilde in full gotcha mode and his accent wanders all over the place. But the self-love never flickers.

As his future wife, Angela Pierce is trim, handsome, quick and supremely self-possessed right up to the moment when she isn’t. It’s an altogether unlikely portrait of the stolid, obscure wife who shared a half-century with GBS, but I savored it as a beguiling performance.

Natalie Gold and Michael Warner play the Webbs in faithful period-documentary style, moving easily through the choreography of director Henry Wishcamper.

Scene changes involve some unusual actor labors but the low-lying Wilson Chin design, stuffed with luxurious period detail, is worth the trouble. Precise period costumes by Alejo Vietti and invisible lighting by Matthew Richards are Globe givens and Paul Peterson drapes some yearning Wagner over the edges to remind us perhaps that romance does keep a seat at all tables.

But even careful scholarship and polished theatricality can’t find the whole truth. In reality, Payne-Townsend had come back from one of their bitter separations to nurse GBS through a serious foot injury when the marriage thing happened.

”I thought I was dead,” Shaw told a friend later. “Charlotte had me at her mercy. I should never have married if I had thought I should get well.”

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