Word: ayrton
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...LOEB PRODUCTION of the play does justice to Wycherly's satire, and in general the performers make the most of the barb-tongued dialogue. Director Norman Ayrton has captured the stylized nature of Wycherly's society in the highly stylized but rarely obtrusive things he has his cast do. Touches like the ladies' fans, which they snap open and shut in precise timing with their lines, and the gestures of the fops and dandies underscore the contrived nature of the life Wycherly satirizes. In the first scene, everyone who walks on stage stops to preen in a full-length mirror...
...director Norman Ayrton's credit that throughout most of the two and a half hours of War and Peace, the historian's illusion of control is sustained. By coloring the play's war scenes with two large slide screens that at times trace Napoleon's progress across the map of Europe and at times stain the background with a dull blood red, Ayrton gives the soldiers' disordered flights a suggestive significance beyond the mere chronicling of events. And by frequently isolating the characters at opposite ends of the stages, Ayrton lends to the few joint tableaux an emotional compression that...
...Ayrton is the invisible force of destiny responsible for the tight, logical progression of the production, then it is the Narrator who continues the director's work after the curtain goes up. Like a commanding general surveying a battle from his horse atop a hill, the Narrator is both involved with and separated from the action. Consistently drawing the lessons to be learned from the playing out of the scenes, the Narrator is the omniscient, controlling eye Tolstoy wished to, but knew he could...
...fate and history at the end of War and Peace which you were always tempted to skip, preferring to have Andrei's death scene with the grieving Natasha at his bedside go on and on? Well, in the adaptation of Tolstoy's epic novel which visiting director Norman Ayrton is staging in the second mainstage slot this season at the end of March, the romantic glow doesn't fade because the moralizing comes first. In the stage version the voice of Tolstoy has been fleshed out as a narrator who in the opening minutes of the play, introduces the characters...
...necessarily disagree with what Mr. Ayrton said in your article but I do very much disagree with your opening paragraph. Franco Colavecchia Designer/Consultant Loeb Drama Center