Word: ceilings
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...CEIL ALLEN...
Tell and Tell. The story concerns three teacher sisters for whom life has proved a bad trip. Catherine Reardon (Estelle Parsons) is a lush. Her younger sister Anna (Julie Harris) is a vegetarian, and that is the least of her nuttiness. The married sister Ceil (Nancy Marchand) is a cool and predatory school superintendent who seems to have frozen into her post. Anna has been involved in some vague sexual incident with a boy at her school, and Ceil has shown up with the papers to have her committed to an asylum. Catherine and Ceil spar on the subject...
...pretends to be, it is not serious theater. Paul Zwindel sidestepped the lachrymose aspects of the old maid's condition, and he placed a buoyant comic balloon in the middle of this short play (presented in an hour and a half with no intermission). The arrival of Ceil for a hostile dinner with Catherine and Anna sets loose a welter of tensions and animosities. Anna, you see, has "flipped," committed a sexual act, undefined but traumatic, with an adolescent hoodlum at her school. She barrages Catherine with demands, seeks protection against the outside world (through a pure vegetarian diet, through...
...Ceil, played by Nancy Marchand, is a potentate in the world of high school administration and her position provides the lead-in for the comic outlet needed to catalyze this play's otherwise ordinary elements into their unexpectedly laugh-filled interaction. As Arthur Miller wrote purely gratuitous comedy into his caricature of a Jewish furniture dealer in The Price -and still wound up with a play soberly moralistic-Zwindel hit on a similar expediency to substitute mirth for nerve-frazzling catharsis: Fleur Stein, portrayed with knowing New York Jewish brashness by Rae Allen, shows up unexpectedly with her husband...
...sips her Manhattan and uses her considerable vocabulary to vent general anger and disgust. When Anna tells Fleur that good vegetable diets result in odorless feces, Catherine flips on the blender. The noise is surprising, perfectly timed. Similarly, Anna twice fires a silver gun, loaded with blanks, first at Ceil, then at Bob Stein. The first shot, before the Stein's visit, had grisly psychological meaning. The second during the Stein's visit was sheer fun, an experience which the whole audience shared in anticipation and empathy...