Word: barest
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...first a curious medium in which to express the madness and torment of Becket's struggle with his fate. What the audience sees is not so much the performance of a play, as the enactment of a ritual. The characters speeches are set in poetry: there is the barest outline of a plot. It is up to the director and the actors themselves to endow this ritual with all the intensity and the passion of the themes it seeks to express. Director David Wheeler and the Theatre Company of Boston succeed in doing this beautifully...
Without its plush outdoor landscapes, the movie would be almost indistinguishable from a particularly disastrous Laugh-In. The choppiness of the action could be excused as it precludes a continuous plot-line, which is also absent in the book. But the minimal transitions that are attempted lack the barest suggestion of originality. It just so happens, for instance, that Grand is an avid TV-watcher, and his propensity to change channels lets Southern smuggle in random bits about a disguised puma that eats its competition at a silk-stocking New York dog show and two gnarled heavyweight contenders who prance...
...quarter round for the "stage"- a clearing in the middle of the room. At the base of the clearing, a ten-foot circle, which provided a focus for the actors' "movement" from scene to scene, was marked on the floor with chalk. The players were costumed in only the barest suggestion of peasant clothing, creating props with pantomime or interpretive embellishment of mundane objects. With these meager facilities, the Caravan players unraveled the most passionately brilliant production that I can remember seeing in the Boston area...