Word: buechner
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...large measure the failure of the spring season at the Loeb, which reportedly set record lows on ticket sales, results from the choice of plays. Buechner's Danton's Death proved far too rhetorical, and a play with a passive protagonist must inevitably drag. James A. Culpepper's Phyllis Anderson Award-winning Treason at West Point combined inept dialogue and inadequate characterization. It was barely competent. Anthony Graham-White's adaptation of Johnson, Marston, and Chapman's Eastward Ho! had more potential--it suffered most from a lack of good comic actors. But the play is hardly an old standby...
...George Buechner wrote Danton when he was 21, and with all the grandiosity one would expect of a young German fatalist and revolutionary. Pronouncements follow epigrams in endless, dulling sequence. In Mueller's translation, at least, it is hard to believe that the characters could be taking themselves seriously. There is almost no psychological exposition more subtle than Danton's announcement that he is bored with the Revolution, or Collot D'Herbois' mechanical callousness...
...there is a feeling of doom about the play--a current that moves below the froth of conversation. The mockery of the whores, the very emptiness of Robespierre's rhetoric, make Buechner's point: that man has no free will, that the dreary sameness of life must over-take the most heroic and the most corrupt. Reading the play, I felt this undertow. At the Loeb, I didn...
...Buechner leaves a lot to the actor and the director. There is little in the speeches to betray the feelings of the men who speak--or to convince us of the feelings they do profess. As he kneels at the guillotine, Herault-Sechelles breaks down: "I can't seem to manage a joke." There are few such lines provided. Almost none of the actors invented the necessary gestures or falterings of the voice to make themselves believable...
John McDonnel (Legendre), Randall McLeod (Barere), William Dockin (Collot d'Herbois) and George Hamlin (Herault-Sechelles) all manager relatively lively characterizations. But they relied entirely on what Buechner gave them. Not one of them worked out any business to rivet the audience's attention. When Robert Chapman (Robespierre) took the podium to address the Jacobin Club, he held the audience in silence while he put on his glasses. No one else in the cast did something like that--not even Williams...