Word: bloom
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Another mighty playwright, Ibsen, offers an equivalent role for a woman in Hedda Gabler. The sad thing about the current off-Broadway revival is that the inner life that Claire Bloom brings to it is chilly, prim and pallid. The inner life is extremely important to Hedda, for otherwise what is left is the story of a kind of grown-up "bad seed," a woman who out of casual malice or native bitchiness burns her would-be lover's brilliant manuscript, pushes him back to drink and gives him a pistol with instructions to shoot himself...
...would want to meet that sort of woman? For 80 years, playgoers have indicated that they are extremely interested in meeting Hedda. They want to know about everything that Miss Bloom fails to tell them: the source and force of her unspent passion, of her neurotic boredom, of her worship of her father, of her loathing for her husband and of many other intriguing things. The playwright has given the actress gold, but it lies under dark ground where she must assiduously dig. The degree of angst that Claire Bloom conveys could easily be relieved with a couple of aspirin...
...shot put, the Crimson's Joe Naughton will receive stiff competition from Dartmouth brothers Ted and Wayne Moody, Navy's Jim Bloom, and Penn's Ed Markowski. Bloom has bettered 58 feet; the others are 55-footers...
...spectrum, the Los Angeles look can be seen in Billy Al Bengston's "dentos"-crumpled aluminum sheets with depths of shimmering, candied and gaseous sprayed color trapped under layers of glossy acrylic. At the other, it is apparent in the prismatic bloom of Larry Bell's immaculate glass boxes, and in Robert Irwin's pale disks floating into immateriality above their own cast shadows. The "look" is always playing games with media (where but in L.A. would an artist do drawings in caviar and gunpowder, as Ed Ruscha did?) and it stops just this side of fetishism...
...strong, scrupulous and thoroughly rewarding revival of Ibsen's A Doll's House now graces off-Broadway. Matching the exquisite delicacy of her features, Claire Bloom moves with emotional assurance from the early phase of the wife as kept puppet to the later phase of the woman who issues an emancipation proclamation to her husband. The larky girlishness of the early Nora is always a bit of a problem, but Miss Bloom manages to be a trifle giddy without appearing inane. As the later Nora, her performance is informed with a grave clarity...