Word: antrobuses
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After an Ice-Age news bulletin that announces the sighting of a sunrise, we enter the scene with an introduction from Sabina (Kristin Gasser), who services the Antrobus family of Excelsior, New Jersey. As the too-big-for-her-britches and too-bright-for-her-job housekeeper warns us, this play makes no sense. "It can't even decide if we're living in caves or in New Jersey," she declares. Throughout the play, Sabina, portrayed with superb wit and giddiness by Gasser, continues to step outside of the drama and remind us that this is only a play...
...Antrobus family itself ought to be the ordinary nuclear unit except that Mrs. Antrobus (Rebecca Clark) has to remind Sabina to milk the pet mammoth, son Henry (Remo Airaldi) is 4000 years old and used to be called Cain, and Mr. Antrobus (Eric Oleson) comes home at night with his prototypical model for the wheel. But even if Henry did, eons ago, kill his brother Abel, and even if Sabina does stumble around the house threatening to give her two-weeks notice, throughout the first act the Antrobus family is united with the remaining inhabitants of the world to save...
...When things are easy, self-interest consumes us until we have too many love affairs or build too many nuclear weapons, and things get tough again. The second-act party turns into the Great Deluge and by the time we're in the third act, war has left the Antrobus home a fortified fallout shelter...
Like Thornton Wilder's Mr. Antrobus, man has survived ice ages, more subtle climatic changes and, thus far at least, his own inventions. Now his adaptability is facing a new challenge. Industrialization and expanding technology are radically altering the environment and exposing man to growing amounts of harmful pollutants, some of them chemicals that did not exist a century, a decade or even a year or two ago. Result: an increase in many old ailments and the emergence of new ones-all traceable to substances in air, water and food. Says Dr. Irving Selikoff of New York...
...time, but has a tendency to mix, or imperfectly finish its conventions. The third act opening (where the play stops because seven of the company are struck with botulism) is magnificent and hilarious because the whole company, especially Beck and Jamie Rosenthal (playing a Miss Somerset playing Sabina, George Antrobus' maid and quondam mistress) degenerates from high flown symbols to grumbling Loebies. The switch is drastic and devastating...