Word: chalks
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Caucasian Chalk Circle, currently being produced by the Harvard Law School Drama Society, boldy pits the bourgeois authority--manifested in the persons of the governor of a Caucasian Village and his wife--against the simple stolidity of the proletariat, in the person of Grusha, their servant girl. The backdrop is the bloody imbroglio of civil war. Grusha, simply and sincerely portrayed by Brooke Stark, retrieves the governor's child. Michael, who has been left behind in the frenzied exodus from the Village. She protects the baby throughout the conflict, risking her personal safety as well as her love...
Brecht, an incredibly ambitious and fecund playwright, borrows Eastern and particularly Indian techniques for Chalk Circle. The inserted songs, somewhat reedily rendered by Stark; the stage-manager as chorus, marvelously narrated by clarion-voiced Andrew Garrett; the use of scene titles--all wed form with geography to good effect. Director Thomas Seoh might have exploited this exotic influence more extravagantly with stilts or wire-hoops. Seoh seemed a bit diffident about taking such directorial prerogatives...
...audience--takes place in a courtroom. From an epic style in the earlier portion of the play. Brecht shifts nimbly to parable. Grusha must contend with the haughty mother over who will gain possession of the child. Azdak, the magistrate-rogue, played with animation by David Miller, gives the "chalk-circle test." Grusha lets go of Michael because she doesn't want to hurt him "I brought him up! Should I tear him apart? I can't do it." In a reversal of the Biblical story of King Solomon, Azdak awards Michael not to his real mother, but to Grusha...
...attempt to bring their lofty ideas to a comprehensible level, both Glashow and Weinberg have decided to offer Core Curriculum courses. A walk into one of Jefferson's airy lecture halls at 10 a.m. on a Friday morning reveals a tall man with tousled hair, chalk in hand, expostulating on one of the many topics "From Alchemy to Elementary Particle Physics." Glashow is a highly engaging lecturer, disorganized perhaps, but gifted with the vibrant tone that communicates his irrepressible enthusiasm for the subject. For his part, Weinberg will be offering a course in "Elementary Particle Physics." One of his colleagues...
...Scheper says what impresses him most about Restic--and it is a talent Scheper values greatly--is the coach's ability to communicate. In a recent chalk session, Scheper says, Restic "looked at us and said, 'if you do this right, it will work 100 per cent of the time,' and in that room you could have picked up the confidence in your hand...