Word: archibald
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...less ambitious transcription from Henry James, The Innocents, proved William Archibald an accomplished craftsman. In some two hours imposed by the theatre, however, even he can't execute an intricate portrait laid on with the brush strokes of eight hundred pages. He has drawn the lines faithfully, attentive to perspective and detail, but the shadings are necessarily hasty and the tone is flat. While elegant, costumed by Beaton and framed in the Eckarts' sets, the portrait remains a sketch. Worst of all, the portrait is dull, for there is neither life nor appeal in the Lady's eyes...
...result is a heavy burden of exposition, which slows the first act hopelessly and blurs the dramatic focus of the play. More important, while the genius of James as a novelist surmounted awkward handling of dialogue, it is almost wholly from that dialogue--often stiff and opaque--that Archibald has fashioned his play. He might better have interpolated passages in which James lights his characters as he seldom does through their words. On such passages the reader relies above all in regard to the "frail vessel" of James' heroine. Without assurances of Isabel's wit and sensitivity, he could find...
...While Archibald's play fails this goal, a gifted actress as Isabel might have attained it. Unfortunately, Jennifer Jones has at this point so little control over the role that she seems to leave it unattended on the stage. In the first act, when Isabel must prove worthy of interest, Miss Jones may well have had her lines on flash cards. Though her words had more conviction in later scenes, there remained the disturbing sense that she was hearing the director: "six steps to the left; wring hands." Miss Jones as Miss Jones learning a part has neither charm...
...some extent casualties of the script. While a few--Warburton, Pansy, Goodwood--are basket cases, even longer parts are challenges to convey in fifty lines a character etched by James in as many pages. Barbara O'Neil's portrayal of the intriguing Serena Merle, ineptly introduced by Archibald, is a major disappointment. While she sails imposingly about the stage, she evokes less "the wisest woman in the world" than the grande dame of Kansas City. Director Jose Quintero, however, must take the blame for allowing one outrageous failure. As Isabel's uncle, Halliwell Hobbes does a prolonged parody of Lionel...
...year history, it has turned out such alumni as Poet Archibald MacLeish, Yale President Whitney Griswold, former New Jersey Governor Charles Edison, Henry Ford II. Today, over its 480-acre Georgian campus, its 353 students still pursue their education with an intensity most any school would envy. It takes in boys of every race and religion, makes them clean their own rooms and wait on table. But more important than its disciplined democracy is the quality of its intellectual fare. The boys are taken up through calculus and analytic geometry, read everything from the Iliad (in Greek) to Racine...