Word: callers
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Each of the four players is equally important in supporting, pillar-like, a corner of the drama: The Mother, Amanda Wingfield (Margaret J. Barker '98); her son, Tom, the narrator (Brett Egan '99); his sister, Laura, who is slightly crippled (Dana Gotlieb '97); and Jim O'Connor, the Gentleman Caller whose visit marks the central Event of the play (Padriac O'Reilly...
There is a curious symmetry in the distribution of weight given to each of the four characters throughout the course of the play. Though Tom's narration frames the overall story, he and his mother dominate the first half (Preparation for a gentleman caller) to give way to Laura and Jim, who come to the forefront in the second (The Gentleman calls). For awhile, Amanda Wingfield really seems to take over as the central figure--the former Southern belle whose husband went AWOL long ago, and who is forced to inhabit a world of straightened means and two children...
...really the other two actors who took the drama to its emotional climax. Gotlieb as Laura communicated primarily through eloquent looks before the arrival of the Gentleman Caller; but opened up with marvelous expressiveness in the tete-a-tete with her former high school "crush." In face, voice, and gesture, she touchingly evoked the painful shyness and self-consciousness of the disabled girl who is given one brief chance to bloom. Yet she also possessed an air of unexpected (and deeply affecting) grace and dignity in the most heartbreaking moment of the play...
...cure themselves of hallucinations (it doesn't work). The everyday magic of this invisible realm is given fiber by the hard facts of natural history she incorporates, and the sheer extravagance of Cuban thinking ("Dreams about carne asada can mean only one thing," a radio hostess opines: "that the caller should devote her life to God"). Writing in a voice not quite like any other, Garcia takes exuberant flight without ever taking leave of the true...
That was obvious last week, when a caller, who had earlier provided Bell's Website with a picture of Bigfoot peeking from behind a tree, reported he had seen "a big ball of light coming down" to where the creature had been standing. "So, it's UFO-involved?" asked Bell mildly. The caller thought so but was hazy on the details...