Word: ausubel
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...with this fine history behind them, it is a joyless task to report that Focus On Me, Caravan's new production that opened last week, just doesn't work. The play was written by the company's director, Bobbi Ausubel, under a grant given by the Radcliffe Institute. It is about (using the word advisedly) a woman filmmaker, Toni, trying to create a film prototype of a strong woman. She parades before us a succession of archetype images (amazon and mother), discarding each in turn as insufficient. He finally settles on one that is supposed to be a synthesis...
...private lives. Our sleeves are stuffed with ready explanations and sound (self-serving) analyses designed to ward off that unwelcome sight. As fast as one is yanked away from us, we produce another. In fact, many in the audience probably can play that game with more finesse than can Ausubel, the author of Focus--producing a result quite opposite from the one desired. Rather than putting us on edge, the play allows us to sit back with unwarranted complacency, feeling that however tenuous may be our grasp on our situation, it is at least more firm than that which...
...critical commonplace that Godot is a kind of abstract, modern Everyman, or Well-theater. In director Bobbi Ausubel's stagey production, the mechanics of living life are identified with those of putting on a play. Characters know just where they are: they wave away a too bright spotlight, carry around the portable tree, and once or twice stop out into the audience to make a comment like "I've been better entertained." The scene is the stage itself: the props represent little more than props. Like the characters, we are given very little information to go on. Getting...
...Director Ausubel has added one twist that does work: casting the envoy from Godot as a young girl, Rebecca Edelson, who shifts uneasily from one foot to another and absently caresses the stage's single tree as the she delivers her message; Mr. Godot will not come this evening, but surely tomorrow, surely tomorrow...