Word: babe
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
They remain in the cage even during intermission. Thomas Babe never lets the captured Resistance fighters of Sartre's Morts Sans Sepulture (The Tombless Dead) out of their makeshift warehouse prison except when the Vichy officers want them to leave. The magnificent cage of playwright-philosophe Sartre, director Babe, and designer William Schroeder is inescapable for the actors. For the audience it is a powerful philosophical paradigm that is often more lucid than the words exchanged inside...
...Babe's direction emphasizes Schroeder's cage. Actors unashamedly play with their backs toward the audience, or careen outward against the flexible but unyielding cagework. All movement in the cage is taut and restricted...
...Babe's cast sustains this intensity except where Sartre's shoddy dramatization makes it impossible. Deitch as the cynical, frankly self-centered, intellectual Henri is magnificent. His swagger is far more powerful as potential than as actuality. A painfully trapped man, he smashes into walls and writhes futilely when tied to a chair of torture...
...dramatist Sartre is pretty amateur. He gives us a trio of Vichy officers who are the Enemy and not much more. Ken Tigar and James Woods play two thankless stereo-types, and Dan Chumley plays an officer who has no dramatic or thematic meaning at all. Babe is uncertain what to do with them. They end up serving as comic relief, buttoning their vests to look presentable when a prisoner comes in to be tortured, or else being so evil as to be laughable...
...predecessors are Treason, the drama of Benedict Arnold, and the non-historical Pageant of the Awkward Shadows, by Thomas Babe...