Word: astes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...play about the Salem witch trials, The Crucible. This is, after all, a year in which special attention is being given to our country's history. The choice might well have fallen on Shaw's The Devil's Disciple, which dramatizes incidents in the American Revolution; but the AST gave us that play six years ago. Furthermore, would it not be better to offer a work not only about America but by an American...
...improvements over their predecessors. Most notably among these is the role of the protagonist, Leontes. Last year's production was seriously harmed by the ravaged voice with which Donald Madden essayed Leontes. Now the part is in the masterly care of Philip Kerr, who has returned to the AST company after a regrettable absence...
...When the AST first did the play, in 1958, we got a pretty fine though hammy Leontes from John Colicos. But Kerr's Leontes is the one we've been waiting for. The part makes for-midable demands on any player, but merits every bit of effort required. Bernard Shaw once wrote, in a letter to the actress Ellen Terry, "Leontes is a magnificent part, worth fifty Othellos (Shakespear knew nothing about jealousy when he wrote Othello), as modern as Ibsen, and full of wonderful music." The slur on Othello was poppycock, but Shaw was otherwise right on the mark...
Kerr now adds Leontes to the list of remarkable portrayals he has limned in earlier AST seasons--including Brutus, Octavius (in both Caesar and Antony), Malcolm, Malvolio, and Angelo. In the 13 years since his graduation from Harvard, Kerr has long since developed into one of the sterling Shakespearen actors of our time...
...Leontes's opposite number, Polixenes, who first suffers injustice and later commits it, George Hearn is an admirable successor to Jack Ryland, although he is not wholly at home in Shakespearean speech. Josef Sommer, absent from the AST for several seasons, is back, once more giving the impression that he was born speaking the Bard's language. This year he is Camillo, the lord who links the worlds of the two kings; and his performance is exemplary (except that the director still insists on substituting the word "undress" for the correct "discase...