Word: absurdities
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House is a flawlessly comic tragedy. Director Adam Schwartz achieves a delicate balance between the absurd and horrific that keeps you laughing throughout the play but leaves you floored by its disturbing conclusion. By keeping the characters aware of the audience through asides, Schwartz draws you in, allowing you to share the intimacy of the scene...
...costuming and the musical selections are equally unsuccessful. Apparently Spraggins intends to resolve the disparities he has created in moving the setting of the play from 1700 to the present by turning World into theater of the absurd. Thus, the actors dress according to the personality of their characters, which might have been a helpful and amusing device, had the execution been less haphazard. Most of the costumes either add nothing in the way of characterization or worse, create an image that is incongruous with the characters. The musical interludes, which range from Billie Holiday to George Michael, are meaningless...
They are the sweetly pious daughters of a visionary preacher. While he lives, they sacrifice their lives to his faintly absurd beliefs. After he dies, they devote themselves to his memory by keeping his dwindling, aging, increasingly fractious flock together. Their story, stretching over many years, is told with deft economy and quiet wit by Writer-Director Gabriel Axel, who builds an uncannily rich texture out of the simplest materials. Still, the viewer muses, this picture is called Babette's Feast. Where is Babette? Where is her feast...
...playing a stock character and plays with enthusiasn. But Michael Starr, as the billionaire's sixth wife, Libby Doe, turns in a-dare I say sensual?-rendition that few performers could manage. Although my only qualification to judge the performers is a stint covering the Theater of the Absurd that is Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Dianne Ferratwinkie (Maurice "Mo" Rocca) is the clear stand-out among Denuar's daughters. Rocca makes his character something more than a Jewish-American princess with a Snuffleupagus physique-he makes the character an audience favorite. Eric Morris's Maura Listic...
...information are a traditional form of initiation for West Point plebes. Cadet John Edwards was able to take the hazing as a freshman, but as a second classman (junior), he would not dish it out. "I couldn't treat other plebes the way I had been treated. It was absurd and dehumanizing," said Edwards last week after he had been expelled from the U.S. Military Academy...