Word: boxful
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...first ten minutes, there is no one at all onstage. The set is simply the metal framework of a box the size of a room. On a garbled tape recording, the voice of Ruth White-middle-aged, pensive, measured and monotonous-fills the box and the theater. The voice is almost sleep inducing, like water lapping persistently at a sea wall. Actress White's monologue consists of some pretentious restatements of the obvious: Art is order; craftsmanship is waning; children in far-off places are starving to death...
After this, the box is supplied with a raised platform so that it seems like the sun deck of an ocean liner. On it sit and stand four characters. One is Chairman Mao Tse-tung (Wyman Pendleton), who mouths Marxist-Leninist platitudes about the irreparable decline of the imperialist West. Another character is a decayed society drone (Nancy Kelly) who recalls her frustrated attempt at suicide together with such intimate details of her sex life as the smooth tautness of her husband's scrotum. Another woman (Sudie Bond) recites the doggerel couplets of a poem called Over the Hill...
...evening. Each speaker seems to be addressing himself, a form of alienation that succeeds wonderfully in alienating the audience. It may be that Albee had in mind Walter Pater's dictum that "all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music." The kind of music one gets in Box-Mao is the dead space between notes...
Vellucci -- with an easy, dignified, and slightly plump grace that complements his sharp features and shock of graying hair, a distinctly Italian Cary Grant--has been here with the East Cambridge caucus from the beginning. And with the eight elderly ladies with pill-box hats, skirts that fall well below the knee, and Norman Rockwell faces who make up the majority of it, he has sat calmly through the agenda thus far, oblivious to the formal proceedings, talking quietly to the many people who come up to him, and smiling continuously at women all over the room...
...give one of four ratings to every movie released in this country: "G" (suitable for general audiences), "M" (mature audiences), "R" (restricted--persons under 16 admitted only with parent or guardan), or "X" (persons under 16 not admitted). Most theatre owners are expected to enforce the ratings at the box office...