Word: clownish
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...alone at work, talking and preparing for an upcoming ballroom-dancing competition. With great spirit, they practice the quick-step and kid each other about dance partners. Keene and Benston develop a pleasant, relaxed rapport, and clearly define their characters--Sam is the gentle, wise adviser to the more clownish Willie...
...takes his place. Dante DiLoreto and Kamella Tate throb with youthful passions, profane and sacred, as a young man facing death for having premarital sex and his sister who finds that yielding her own virginity is the only way to save him. Larry Paulsen, who displays range as the clownish Touchstone in As You Like It and as Titus' loyal brother, brings off an even trickier feat in Measure: allowing a modern audience to enjoy as fully as Elizabethan groundlings must have the dimwit puns and malapropisms of the hapless constable Elbow...
...brilliant production. Kilty litters the stage with throwaways, sight gags (a very prominent Cherub's phallus is put to some inventive uses), and blatant two-dimensional parodies. Two pedants, Holofernes (Jeremy Geidt) and Sir Nathanid (Harry S. Murphy), converse while playing a hilariously dishonest game of croquet; the clownish Constable Dull (John Bottoms) runs his bike into a hedge; the Queen of France enters in a '37 Cadillac (What is behind the ART's fascination with getting vehicles on stage?). Most attempts to include dancing in Shakespeare look forced and clumsy, even though they were prominent in the original; apparently...
...magic juice that flips him from one world to the other. Some of the authors' imaginings come appealingly to life. The air in the Territories is so clear, for instance, that if someone pulls a radish out of the ground, it can be smelled half a mile away. Clownish, somewhat dim-witted werewolves loyally guard flocks of cow/sheep, but prudent householders stay out of their way when the moon is full...
...cold and cobra-like, vengeful and vain. He has a genuine element of fervor: he endures ritual flogging, dispenses alms, even appears to heal the halt and lame. But there is nothing inspirational in him and nothing ennobling in his impact. In the opening scenes, the actors appear in clownish whiteface and lurch like robots. The playing reaches its tenderest pitch at an utterly perverse moment: Harriet Harris, as Orgon's wife, fakes lust for Tartuffe so as to reveal his perfidy to her husband, throbbing with an emotion that we never see Orgon arouse in her. The play...