Word: buffoons
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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...
...Dumb Waiter is a very funny play, and Director Robert Chapman has chosen to emphasize its comic aspects--at the expense of just about everything else. Gus, played by K. Lype O'Dell, is a perfect buffoon throughout the play. Ben(David Meneghel) is more the prototype of the cool, calm professional killer, but he eventually is caught up in volatile arguments with Gus about absolutely trivial subjects. If The Dumb Waiter were only a funny play, if Pinter were capable of nothing more than writing funny dialogue, one could scarcely have found fault with O'dell's or Meneghel...
...central figures are Anne Duncan, a waitress and technically a virgin, and Zeke Daniels, the braggartly buffoon who marries her. There are assorted relatives: Anne has a weak, churchly mother, Zeke a managing mother and a popinjay father who struts in Klan robes. They are presented in a protracted series of flashbacks leading from the marriage of Anne and Zeke. The flashbacks do not resolve down to a nub of meaning but are centrifugal, leading away from meaning into the thinning reaches of an infinity of pointlessness. Conversations take place but nothing is said. Eventually the book stops, Farrell having...
...health (he was a neurasthenic). Her idol was Henry James, and of the famous people she met, he is the one she remembered best -the one with whom, as James put it, she was "more and more never apart." Intentionally or not, she makes him out to be a buffoon. He was so convinced of his own poverty, she recalls, that when guests visited him at his home outside London, "the dreary pudding or pie of which a quarter or half had been consumed at dinner reappeared on the table the next day with its ravages unrepaired...
...Polonius, as Hume Cronyn sees him, is a buffoon, who turns most of his scenes with Hamlet into slapstick comedy. Cronyn wrings from the part all the humor that is there and a good deal, I think, that is not. He is Polonius from Hamlet's point of view, a "tedious old fool," without a trace of the skilled counselor who had been invaluable to Denmark...