Word: boorstins
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Unfortunately, good theatre-like Cambridge romances, occasional impulses toward optimism, and New England spring days on which the sun doesn't dissolve into rain-is an ephemeral creature. And since David Boorstin's intelligent and suitably enchanting production of The Tempest has already come and gone (it played the Loeb Ex this past weekend), I am put in the unenviable position of sounding like a miser entangled in gloating recitation of secret joys and pleasures. But what other way is left us to recapture the moment lost? Shakespeare's Tempest, being full of such stuff as dreams are made...
...design for mass-produced muskets with interchangeable parts, public support for technological progress has been an American tradition. Out of this tradition has grown an obsession with speed, a consequence of the nation's great distances and the rush to cover them quickly, producing what Historian Daniel J. Boorstin calls "a technology of haste" that dates back to the pioneering steamboats of nearly two centuries ago. Add to those themes the national desire to win, to be first. A natural consequence was the historic landing of men on the moon, an event that meant to Eric Hoffer the triumph...
Genuine Advance? To John Burke, dean of social sciences at U.C.L.A., the defeat of the SST marks "a change in our civilization's idea of progress." If that is so, it has its dangers, for, as Boorstin points out: "We can't give up the exploring spirit. We can't legislate against progress. Our problem is to find ways of continuing to explore the unknown and still keep our lives decent...
...blind faith (I want to believe!) can't change this jeremiad into a hymn to Loeb rediviva. The massive painted backdrop, the portentous music between acts, the stilted acting all stand between this Loeb company and effective communication of Sartre's conception. This does not imply that David Boorstin's production of Dirty Hands misinterprets Sartre; it merely suggests that through slavish efforts at virtuosity within the Old Theatrical canon, these people have denied the goal of effectiveness and missed their audience...
...Boorstin's production gets bogged down in the superficialities, primarily, I suppose, because the material resources at hand at the Loeb make it so easy to attend to detail. There is fine detail in the costumes by Jacqueline Berger. Steven Downs has come up with an ingenious set, staggered diagonally on three levels. Each act thus has an interesting microcosmic quality, since it is played out on a small, elevated stage. As an act ends the light breaks off suddenly, creating an effect of structured progression when action is renewed on a different platform. Lighting and sound...