Word: adela
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...written for an all-female cast, we never see Pepe, the handsome suitor who drives the play to its bloody conclusion. He asks the hand of Angustias, the eldest and richest daughter, a shriveled 39-year-old spinster. At the same time, he carries on an affair with Adela, the youngest Alba daughter and the only beauty in the family. Another sister, the hunchback Martirio, is also in love with Pepe. The rest can be left to the imagination of the reader...
...despair of the unappealing Angustias. Pat Collinge as Martirio controls a part that could easily be overplayed, and Anne Crawford and Mary Lambert do a commendable job of defining two other sisters whose characters Lorca left somewhat vague. Saralaine Evans, unfortunately, has some difficulty with the role of Adela. She moves stiffly and occasionally declaims in a monotonous, over-dramatic voice in a way that never lets one forget she's acting...
...Adela proudly notes that Rogers was the first trial lawyer to make extensive use of props. To demonstrate the direction of a bullet that had killed a man, Rogers brought the dead man's small intestines into court. "Ghoul, grave robber!" shouted the prosecutor, but Rogers won the case. In a morals case, police witnesses claimed they had watched the crime through holes in a door. Rogers lugged the door into court. He placed the defendant behind the door, put a girl on his lap, and invited judge and jury to peep through the door. None of them could...
Four years later, when Clarence Darrow was accused of bribing a juror, it was Rogers he asked to defend him. Even Rogers' enemies conceded that his defense was brilliant. Adela pictures Darrow sitting morosely in court, Rogers doing his best to pep him up. Long before the trial was over, writes Adela, Darrow was assured of acquittal; but he almost convicted himself by making a two-day speech to the jury. Darrow wept so much that his sleeves looked as if they had been "plunged into a rain barrel." Obviously piqued that Darrow's reputation outshines daddy...
...Adela passes quickly over one murder case Rogers lost, but here he was at his best as a lawyer and as a man. He was defending a feeble-minded 17-year-old who had senselessly clubbed another boy to death. There was a public outcry for a hanging, and the boy was duly sentenced to die, but not before Rogers, a lifelong foe of capital punishment, had fought the case to the Supreme Court with tenacity and eloquence. Beneath Rogers' malarkey, his swagger and his courtroom stunts was a real compassion for the outcasts of the world...