Word: babe
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Thomas J. Babe, Jr. '63, of Kirkland House and Rochester, N.Y., has been selected as one of four recipients of Henry Fellowships for advanced study at either Oxford or Cambridge Universities in England next year. Also selected were two seniors from Yale University and one from the University of Michigan...
Clearly this story has its gruesome elements, and Thomas Babe has appropriated them in order, it appears, to account for the behavior of Walter and Griselda. "On his lust present was al his thoght," Chaucer writes of the Lord (meaning his immediate pleasure or wish), and speaks of his "merveillous desir his wyf t'assaye." Babe, ingeniously, has translated this "lust" or "desir" into Walter's elaborate obsession with a pageant he is composing. We do not learn much about the pageant except that it presumably celebrates some ideal of constancy and that it involves the character of Herod...
That is what I assume Babe is getting at, and unfortunately it all sounds much better than it is. The first act charmingly and subtly presages the fourth, but a prodigious deal of dross is stuffed to fill the gap between them. Characters pass the time mysteriously hiding information from each other in innumerable false suspenses, or alternatively describing over and over what has been going on. When these devices begin to wear thin, Babe returns to the stage a crew of tedious mystics who repeat each other's lines after the familiar pattern of the Western--you know...
...middle acts, to be fair, are not consistently dismal. Babe, before he turned director and playwright, was the finest comic actor in the College, and the comic moments of his Councillors Eff and Gee are, (assisted by the talents of Timothy Mayer and Michael Ehrhardt), his smoothest drama. But there is too much mummery, too many blood red bubbles in the well and strange noises in the night, for the midsection to cohere; it collapses under a load of unnecessary mysticism and unnecessary explication which the Stranger (Philip Kerr) most represents...
...have no quarrel with George Hamlin's directing; its defects are those of a play that often drags. Unquestionably Babe has given most of his care to the role of Walter, and Richard Simons sees to it that his lines are not wasted; he knows how to be sufficiently kindly in his final derangement to make the switches of the pageant plausible, just as Griselda (Carol Schechtman) is sufficiently astute, generous, and conventional. The mystics, led by Kerr and Belle MacDonald, have nothing but ghosts of parts to feed on, which is a pity, for they are evidently capable players...