Word: acted
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...associate director of personnel, John B. Butler, later stated that Harvard could not act as supervising employer for a C.O. because it would violate the confidentiality of the employee's record. Although Harvard would, if the employee requested it, provide any information to a draft board, it could not promise in advance to sign the Selective Service forms necessary to certify his alternate service...
...first act shows an aristocratic bunch of Frenchmen who deliberately set out to humiliate an ex-classmate of lowly birth, Bitos, who has managed to rise to a high and powerful post in the Judiciary in post-Liberation France. This is accomplished by having all the dinner party guests dress up as characters from the French Revolution. Bitos is cast as Robespierre and subjected to much abuse from the other upper class guests...
...turns out that Bitos is not an unlikely man for the part of Robespierre since he once ordered his closest friend killed because this friend had collaborated with the Germans during the war ten years ago. Anouilh rails at this bit of petty bureaucratic brutality be linking this act of Bitos' to the tortuous reasoning by which Robespierre condemned some of his closest associates to the guillotine...
Anouilh has clearly touched on some important social problems, but he deals with them so superficially that it becomes hard to credit his sincerity. In Act Two the play shifts to Robespierre himself in the French Revolution and Anouilh goes on to caricature the man asserting at one point that Robespierre killed "because he couldn't succeed in growing up." The dangers that come along with the second generation of revolutionary leaders, who are generally more intolerant and uncompromising than the original leaders, are too serious to allow one to be happy at seeing them parodied in Anouilh's manner...
Structurally too the play is unbalanced since Act Two nearly completely submerges the Bitos character and, when we finally return to Bitos this play succumbs to one of the more ludicrous forced endings of all time...