Word: booths
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...GLASS BOOTH is a dramatic offspring of the Adolf Eichmann trial, reviving the stale questions of German guilt, Jewish passivity, and the paranoid personality of the archkiller. The play's best excuse for being is a performance of atomic power and blinding virtuosity by Donald Pleasence. He is like a neurotic blood relative whom one cannot abide or yet disown. He is as hallucinatorily real as a dream from which one cannot awaken...
...electorate this year is nowhere greater than in the supporters of Wallace. It makes me shudder to think that a politician with his lack of originality could draw such a sizable following. Or perhaps 13.5 million adult Americans can't be wrong. Perhaps, as I enter the voting booth this November, I should close my eyes tightly...
...Share the guilt" seems to be the theatrical slogan of the hour. The Man in the Glass Booth asks playgoers to share guilt for the massacre of the Jews. The Great White Hope asks playgoers to share guilt for the oppression of the Negro. Both are dramas of contrition with little internal life; they would scarcely stir, except for the borrowed adrenaline of newspaper headlines, past history, and the emotional sympathies of the already converted. For the price of a mea culpa, the audience is made to feel good by feeling...
...expressly charged with the extermination of Jews, three armed Israeli agents abduct him for trial. The court scene that dominates Act II is a desultory affair. It would be a sleepy bore except for Pleasence's arrogant depiction of Dorff. At one point, he rises in his glass booth to deliver a kind of prose love poem to his Führer. The speech rises toward erotic ecstasy so that the climaxing "Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!" is an orgasm of fanaticism. It terrifyingly evokes Hitler's own idea that the masses are feminine and wish...
...conception of martyrdom makes it seem less a matter of conscience that an attention-getting device on a grandiose scale. Some crimes-and the murder of the Jews is certainly one-dwarf atonement and defy retributive justice. A token of evil can be caged in a glass booth, but evil itself can never be exorcised there...