Word: caravans
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Since Woodstock, a frenzied, adoring documentary seems to have been made about every tour and concert in contemporary rock 'n' roll. For last year's Great Medicine Ball Caravan, a movie studio even subsidized a festival in order to film it. Not to be out done, Fillmore treats the closing performances at the Fillmore West as if they were the last rites in the Roman Colosseum before the barbarians came to town...
Hands Off! is a protest against external control in any form: the plays the Caravan has chosen are therefore political only in a very broad sense; it is-the Actor's Prologue about Power and the Indochina War that makes the political intent of the production much more specific. The Prologue moves right into Mrozek's "Strip-tease," a very funny and clearly understandable play. Two people, Man "A" representing rationality and the virtues of inner, intellectual freedom, and Man "B" representing emotionality and the virtues of physical freedom, are confined and gradually deprived of their clothing by a giant...
...PLAYS are always difficult to do in series. The problem results from their self-contained nature; they could work individually, but together as a production they often have very little coherence. The Caravan Theatre's Hands Off! is a pleasant exception to this sort of problem; they have put together two Becketts and one Mrozek that together make a theatrical and intellectual whole...
...Caravan has a great deal of difficulty with "Cascando." Beckett wrote it as a radio play; the Caravan stages the play with a whole new and confusing subplot, centering around the themes of freedom and release. The three parts of the mind, rather than complementing each other, with this addition instead become opponents in attempts to get across a masking tape line on the stage. When someone does succeed, a yellow light flashes on. This pattern of conflict, coupled with a great deal of unnecessary gesture, buries Beckett's originally spare, vicious play in a mass of directorial obfuscation. David...
Hands Off! moves from a comedy of the absurd, to a tragi-comedy of depression, to simple depression; from voice and action and thought, to action and thought, to just thought. But the external power is always there. The Caravan gives us no solution; they merely pose the dilemma--"hands-off!" is only a tactic. The Prologue indicates that it is only a delaying tactic at best...