Word: caligula
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...came early to his vocation. He was a fifth-form schoolboy at St. Marks, the prestigious Episcopal prep school in Southborough, Mass., when he received his calling. Awkward, myopic, shy, dull in class except in history, he shambled about the sham Tudor buildings. His friends called him "Cal," after Caligula, because he was so uncouth; he liked that, and today is still known as Cal. His nature became clear to classmates after he started reading commentaries on the Iliad and Dante's Inferno. As his roommate, Artist Frank Parker, recalls: "The point was that you could put yourself into...
...exceptions responsible for mass murder in the U.S. All, or none, of this may be true?or, most likely, part of it. But the fact is that mass murder is by no means an exclusive American institution; it has been perpetrated in scores of countries down the ages, from Caligula's Rome to the Congo...
When he shouts, the audience cringes at the distraught intensity of his voice, and when he sobs despairingly, they feel only pity. Where Camus intended Caligula to learn what despair really means, in the body itself, Karlen already knows despair; what he learns is logic, or the logic of logic...
Happily, the force of Wheeler's refreshing interpretation and Karlen's convincing performance is sustained by a mature troupe of supporting players. Barbara Colby is uncannily believable as Caligula's almost worn out but vapidly feminine mistress, and Jerome Raphel appears as strong, conscious and submissive as one could hope Caligula's ex-slave bodyguard to be. Only Joseph Hindy, who plays Caligula's naive, sensitive and ultimately rejected friend, Scipio, seems out of place on this fine stage. His movements are stiff, he slouches, and he swallows too many lines...
...profit Theatre Company of Boston, one can sympathetically accept the limitations of Mary Shepley's monotonously simple, cheezy costumes. It's a bit harder, however, to dismiss some lousy makeup work, most apparent when Karlen enters looking more like a trick-or-treater than a battered Caligula...