Word: clemenson
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...performers, the "mechanicals" remain nearly identical to, and equally adept as, last spring's company, with the welcome addition of Chris Clemenson, who makes an impassively cheerful Snout and a ponderously funny Wall. The male lovers, Stephen Rowe's Demetrius and Eric Eliee's Lysander, are as energetic a pair as they were last season; new faces animate the female roles--Cynthia Darlow as Hermia and Cherry Jones as Helena. Darlow's Hermia thrusts her lower lip out at life with a little-girl pout that is sometimes winning and a whine that's sometimes shrill; Jones is more...
With only a shriveled, frenzied mutterer at its core, this Lear lacks coherence. Nor does Chris Clemenson's Gloucester provide even a hunch-backed spine to this play. He is too fretful, laborious, lumbering. In past productions, Clemenson has used his expressive and modulated voice to define a character. Here however, the lighting often shields his face and his changes in tone seem unusually grating. Only after Gloucester's blinding does he add subtle vision to his performance, staggering to the edge of the Dover cliffs and pitching forward to a living death...
When he ultimately dies a real death, Gloucester collapses to the stage and remains there, an unmoving corpse, for an hour. Clemenson's endurance is remarkable. Sellars has turned his actors into marathon runners moving--not always smoothly--through their paces. Admirably, he has tried to mesh an Elizabethan notion of the play with an ill-defined space-age concept. He successfully holds to many 16th Century traditions but engulfs them with gadgets and gimmickry...
...difficult to present as the eye-gouging scene in King Lear. Redford stages it identically to the courtroom scene, with Hermione on a pedestal above the rest of the players. It is a beautiful idea, uniting the play--allowing the virtue of Hermione to conquer all this time around. Clemenson once again masters the complexity of his role, as he wondrously discovers that the statue is in fact his living wife...
...ACTION switched to Bohemia in the fourth act, Redford stayed behind in Sicilia. In another production an act as terrible as this would destroy the entire show. But Redford's exceptional talents shine nonetheless in the other four acts--which are gilded by the exceptional performances of Shohet and Clemenson. Shohet's performance is of a calibre rare for the Harvard stage. Clemenson's performance is a of a calibre rare for any stage...