Word: calibans
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...wondrous box meant to entertain? To elevate? To instruct? To anesthetize? The medium, in its sheer unknowable possibilities, seems to arouse extreme reactions: contempt for its banal condition as the ghetto of the sitcom, or else grandiose metaphysical ambitions for a global village. The tube is Caliban and Prospero, cretin and magician. "What makes television so frightening," writes Critic Jeff Greenfield, "is that it performs all the functions that used to be scattered among different sources of information and entertainment." Television could, if we let it, electronically consolidate all of our culture -theater, ballet, concerts, newspapers, magazines and possibly most...
John Merrick (1863-90) was so monstrously deformed that beside him Caliban might seem shapely. His head had the circumference of a normal man's waist, and the bone structure occluded one eye and twisted his mouth into a slobbering aperture. A spongy cauliflower-shaped mass on the back of his head and other body growths gave off an odious suppuration. His hip was deformed, and he could scarcely walk. Only his left arm and his genitals were unmarred. So grotesque was Merrick's body, in fact, that he was banned from appearing in sideshows, for a time...
...justifiable, even if it does not really work. The triumvirate of directors makes an honest stab at bringing elements of dance and mime into the production. but their efforts tend to be too confusing and ineffective. For example, many of the lines spoken by Miranda (Andrea Eisenberg) and Caliban (Marc Baum) are repeated a bear or two later by their doubles and/or triples. The result is a boring, seemingly endless round-robin effect that slows the tempo and makes it harder for the actors to maintain dramatic tension...
...innovative insertions are, with a few exceptions, burdensome and even annoying. Jeff Rothstein as the speaking Prospero saves the first half with a strong, well-modulated voice and a smooth characterization of the nobleman, set adrift years before, who seeks his revenge through sorcery. Marc Baum sparkles as Caliban, the semi-human creature who tries to escape his enslavement to Prospero. Baum bellows and mugs marvelously as the half-sane, half-stupid creature, off-setting weak performances by all three Mirandas, all of whom seem drugged...
...Caliban's words to the intruders on his island seem uniquely fitted to one of the bleakest acts of cultural colonization in history: the English subjugation of Ireland, which began with the Anglo-Norman invasion of 1169. In the flowering of Irish monastic culture during what were once routinely called the Dark Ages, the visual arts in Ireland had reached a splendor unequaled in the rest of Europe. But war, burning and pillage destroyed most of the relics...