Word: bettie
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...major event was the American premier of The Burnt Flower-Bed, written in 1952 by the late Italian dramatist Ugo Betti. Betti has been hailed as a greater playwright than Pirandello; he is certainly not that, but he does deserve a place among the most important modern writers for the theatre. This play deals with the problem of present-day nihilism and international political diplomacy. If it did not lapse periodically into propagandistic sermonizing, it would be a masterpiece...
...different levels, the philosophic, the political, and the intimately personal; yet all three are perfectly fused. It observes the classic unities of time and place and occurs against a magnificent backdrop of mountains (which the set of the current production has denied us). The theme must owe something to Betti's lifelong career as a magistrate: it tells of the final human hunger to make sense of things--political catastrophies, the death of those we love--by restoring the concepts of guilt and innocence, punishment and choice, in all their dreadful nobility. Only by forcing the wedge of moral responsibility...
...opening night last Tuesday, most of the Tufts players seemed bent more on obscuring Betti's genius than on revealing it. Much of the trouble must no doubt be attributed to the inevitable pressures of summer stock on a small, young, and inexperienced company; the relentless demand for an entire new production each week cannot help but produce some shaky premieres, with cues missed and whole speeches being dropped right and left. One had the sense of watching a late rehearsal rather than an actual performance, in fact, and it is therefore particularly difficult to pass judgment...
...ineffectual gestures who methods his way through one purely visceral crisis after another. Where we should have Trotsky in exile, we get something like Governor Long. Indeed, the major flaw of this production throughout was a submerging of the intellectual tensions in an unrelieved broiling bathos of emotionality. Betti's classic balance of philosophic dialogue and human drama was tipped over by an exclusive concentration on the latter. Lines were used as a histrionic medium in which the actors could palpitate rather than ever being allowed simply to mean, to communicate, to convey their propositional sense: it is the theatre...
...actors are sure to have their lines and cues down pat, the pace of the performance will accelerate and acquire structure, and in all probability the Tufts production will have become more than adequate. I choose to look on the bright side because the American premiere of Ugo Betti's masterpiece is not an event to be missed. For later productions will fully certify its claim to be one of the great plays of the twentieth century--as timely as the latest headline from Geneva, as timeless as the struggle of man's will with fate...