Word: autumns
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...freedom in the past seven years, the Black Sash members-largely women of English stock whose husbands oppose the government-once again vowed to stand stern symbolic watch until Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd's government forced the sabotage bill through to the inevitable successful vote. In the autumn chill, Black Sash Chairman Jean Sinclair, a 54-year-old Johannesburg housewife, and her handful of matronly recruits were swathed in overcoats as they lit their symbolic torch of freedom and posted placards reading "Reject the Sabotage Bill." Promptly, young pro-Nationalist hooligans gathered to hurl eggs, water bombs, stones. Once...
Picking up characters just when external events promise a crisis can make a writer's job easier because it guarantees a dramatic situation. In Autumn Garden, Lillian Hellman does not depend on circumstantial crisis. Instead she has placed ten people in a once-fashionable home outside New Orleans, and lets them develop the play by well-exposed attempts to define their relationships and to regear their lives. Almost everyone fails; only a European girl, Sophie, is young and tough enough to extricate herself...
...influence of Chekhov on Hellman's play has been pointed out before, and it is strongest in the way characters reveal themselves without self-description, and in the brevity of exposition. Unfortunately, the dull set at the Charles did not enhance the sense of a crumbling milieu that Autumn Garden evokes, and the three-sided stage robbed the audience of 33 per cent of the performances...
Murray has done Boston a service in choosing Autumn Garden, but he hasn't done the play justice. The off-again-on-again Southern accents turn into an inexplicable hodge-podge, and the third act is thoughtlessly staged like a Virginia reel, as couples pair off for their final promenades...
...Autumn Garden tackles a couple of big illusions, and its dialogue is never wasted chit-chat. Miss Hellman indicates that love has been over-advertised. In her work it never takes on mystical qualities or solves life's problems upon arrival. Similarly, talent by itself means little; accomplishment is a truer index. After a certain stage of the game, latent talent will not bloom and the magic turning points won't arrive. The author's technical refusal to base the play on a crisis situation is beautifully suited to this theme...