Word: caine
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Bill Cain's King Lear creates ironies like that; the production staggers like blind Gloucester between a formal, tradition-ridden interpretation and a self-consciously innovative approach, until it topples over a Dover cliff of its own creation into farce. Too many serious lines receive laughs, or worse, snickers, from BSC's audience; the incongruities in Cain's direction must take the blame...
...squat, waving a wooden gyroscope over his head like some mystical wand. The standard swipes, grunts, and lunges of the Shakespearian sword-fight punctuate the duel between Edgar and Edmund, but the preceding battle between France's forces and the English army becomes a strange slow-motion dumbshow on Cain's stage...
...farmers who unwisely took on onerous debts in the mid-1970s to buy costly new acreage in the be lief that prices for farm land would continue to soar. The typical farmer, who has a modest 170 in debt for every dollar in assets, has no need to raise Cain in Washington...
...taken this troublesome text and given it a high-spirited once-over. Director Bill Cain, like the Duke in the play, sets up his machinery and watches it work--and he's more successful than the Duke ever can be. But he lets the audience fend for itself in the play's moral wilderness, relying on energy and competence rather than a consistent interpretation to pull them through. To be fair, any attempt at consistency in Measure for Measure would end up forcing parts of the play out of shape; but if directors never even tried, the play might just...
...wild, marrying couples and ending subplots in one-line salvos--and he never wrote comedy again. But he left directors with an awesome problem of how to present the scene believably. They have offered it as a parody of incompetent plotting, or a piece of elaborate literary criticism; but Cain gets away with doing it straight because his production never raises three-quarters of the questions dispatched so off-handedly here...