Word: brooked
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Midsummer Night's Dream, the Brook tactic is amplified. As experienced, the world of a dream is nocturnal and ill-defined. Brook sets his Dream within three sharp, blazingly white gym walls. For trees, Brook gives us heavy metal coils. Bucolic imagery becomes relentlessly urban...
...show's director, Peter Brook, is a man of many devices. His chief device is to defeat the traditional expectations of the audience. His credo might be "Accentuate the opposite." This credo links Marat/ Sade with King Lear and A Midsummer Night's Dream. Do we expect actors to move naturally on stage and to speak intelligible words? In Marat/ Sade, Brook made his actors move as if walking were a stylized, agonized abstraction of motion. The actors moaned, groaned, hissed and made surrealistic animal noises. Do we think of Lear as an arrogant red-hotheaded old king...
...Many Tricks? This is not to say that Brook has violated Shakespeare. However, the incessant sportive business of the production-stilt-walking, juggling, confetti and paper-olate throwing -makes one wonder a little about the Brook who has said that in today's theater "we must open our empty hands and show that really there is nothing up our sleeves." Is he not now committed to wearing a few too many tricks on his sleeve...
...Midsummer Night's Dream raises one further question. Both Peter Brook and Jerzy Grotowski. the astringently rigorous Polish director to whom Brook is partially indebted, have repeatedly claimed that they want to restore the theater to actors and actresses. Yet the results of this director-actor axis have ironically proved the opposite. Actors under Brook and Grotowski express Brook and Grotowski, rather in the manner of orchestras under the batons of Toscanini or Koussevitzky. Their group efforts are mesmerically disciplined, but their individuality seems submerged...
Class agents are, Currier: Karen Wilson of Bound Brook, New Jersey; North: Susan Klinger of Phoenix, Arizona; South: Elizabeth Coons of Lowell and Brookline...