Word: chalks
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...Caucasian Chalk Circle, by Bertolt Brecht, is a kind of pinko version of The Perils of Pauline. Grusha (Elizabeth Huddle) is a good soul, a simple kitchen maid who snatches up an infant princeling when the child is abandoned by the evil wife of the governor during a revolution in a legendary kingdom around A.D. 1200. With the baby strapped to her back, Grusha embarks on a series of adventures that include crossing a rotting bridge over a 2,000-ft. gorge with soldiery in hot pursuit, a marriage of inconvenience with a draft dodger, and a confrontation several years...
...amoral scamp of a judge (Robert Symonds), a sort of pie-eyed Falstaff in a sloppy judicial gown, prescribes the test of the chalk circle to determine the true mother. The little boy stands in the center of the circle, and each woman holds one of his arms and is told to tug him out. Grusha lets go so as not to hurt the boy, and is adjudged the true mother for acting motherly. The moral: "What there is shall go to those who are good for it." This could prove that millionaires are best qualified to have money...
...play is not tediously didactic. It is a little bit as if Brecht had purified the character of Mother Courage, made her an ardent, spunky, dutiful young girl, and graced her with luck as well as pluck. The Caucasian Chalk Circle's essential mood is playful and bucolic. But anything bucolic in this repertory production at New York's Lincoln Center is lost in the grinding whirr of revolving stages and the clanking rise and fall of scenery. The music, crucial to any decent Brecht production, seems to have been composed by a tone-deaf mute. Watching...
...thousands of bicheiros who haunt the street corners, shops and offices of every city and are easily identified by their sunglasses and cigars. Drawings are usually held at 2 p.m. in local bicho headquarters, and the winning numbers are immediately dispatched by taxi and bicycle, scribbled in chalk on designated walls and lampposts. So clogged do phone lines become after each drawing that telephone company executives call it "the bicho hour...
...least $150,000 before it begins to break even. El Diario, on the other hand, is moving into a larger building this month; more up-to-date presses will enable it to increase its pages from 48 to 60 or more. Encouraged by his New York success, Roy Chalk is now considering starting other editions of El Diario in Miami or Los Angeles. And after a cordial interview with General Francisco Franco last month, he has made some plans to found a highbrow El Diario, devoted largely to business news, in Spain...