Word: brecht
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...best-drawing play has been Chekov's Uncle Vauya, which is averaging a paid attendance of 415. Brecht's Trumpets and Drums, which opened last week and is being shown only nine times, is expected to do as well...
Farquahr's plot was concerned with a captain and a sergeant who try to recruit a company of soldiers in the country town of Shrewsbury during the War of the Spanish Succession. Brecht changed the time to 1776; his Captain Plume is the hero of Bunker Hill (he won the battle by cutting open a dike so that the American "dirt farmers" fled to try to save their fields). He and Sergeant Kite are unable to recruit men successfully by legal means; they try various tricks and finally resort to a morality campaign which "cleans up" Shrewsbury by having...
...rolling and the company makes excellent use of Horace Armistead's sets, the best the Loeb has seen in a long time. The sets are lavish and contain a lot of the props necessary to keep the action rolling, but they permit the visible-to-the-audience scene changes Brecht called...
Mark Bramhall and Marjorie Lerstrom drew the two roles most chopped up by the crossfire between Brecht and Farquahr. Farquahr's Worthy is an amorous country gentleman of leisure and a bit of a buffoon; Brecht's is a shoe merchant who plans to sell his boots to the platoon Plume recruits, and his mental temperature oscillates between extremet canniness and extreme romanticism. Bramhall might have made the role gell a bit better by treating some of Worthy's protestations as posturing. Miss Lerstrom faces the same problem with Melinda and resolves it by throwing herself vigorously into the lady...
...good an American premiere of a Brecht play should not be allowed to perish after just nine performances; hopefully the Loeb will extend the run; perhaps the show could even be remounted once the school year gets underway...