Word: budd
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...Louis Coxe wrote the first draft of Billy Budd. Neither remembers who first suggested it since both had specialized in Melville as undergraduates. After the Experimental Theatre produced the play in '49, they rewrote it for an interested Broadway producer. "We did it in six days over a barrel of Martinis," Chapman remembers with a contented grin. "God, what a wonderful time...
...when Billy Budd opened in New York, the good times were over. Received with near-adulation by the critics, the show nightly played to a handful of friends of the authors, theatre habituates and an occasional tourist who couldn't get tickets for South Pacific. The theatre world did its best for Champman's first effort. One group, calling it a major contribution to the American stage, took a full page ad in the Times urging New Yorkers to support it. The actors voluntarily cut their salaries to the legal minimum, to cut operating expenses. And after each performance...
...hunt. It deals with the gnosis of lost causes exhumed to terrorize and destroy men who cheated for them "in another time and in another country." Most of all, it is a play about a certain general who never existed and who, I doubt, could ever exist. In "Billy Budd" Robert chapman and Louis Coxe created a personification of good, and no one questioned whether or not he ever walked the face of this earth, because it didn't matter. "Billy Budd" was too much a parable, and its setting in another century on the high seas made unreal characters...
Like Billy Budd, the general might have come to life on a battlefield removed from his world of the pentagon. In this setting, he too often cramps the other, more real characters, who seem straining to become human. A state department official, another general, a newspaper reporter--these characters are nearer our reality, although all of them are just a bit too good. even their mistakes occurred because they were always doing what they thought was right...
Chapman, co-anther of "Billy Budd," has assisted Radcliffe girls in many of their theatrical productions...