Word: comic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Australian-born Zoe Caldwell, who was awarded a Tony for her performance in Slapstick Tragedy, camouflages the plight of a play that has said its all in the first 20 minutes by resolute diversions of voice, manner and meticulous comic timing. Unfortunately, she would rather see through, than be, Miss Brodie. She does not trust the role enough and kids it in a slyly satirical put-on instead of letting herself be consumed by it. If she had created a warped, vulnerable, fitfully valiant and perpetually self-deluded human being, playgoers might have laughed with Miss Jean Brodie...
However, such technical expertise of the Bennington troupe could not altogether compensate for some of the flaws of the young choreographer. Only the dances designed to be comic invariably worked. Esprit de Corps, subtitled "Eight bodies make one body; never will those bodies do anything but make that one body," was a dry and witty piece done to the music of Ornette Coleman. Eight dancers jittered towards and away from each other, popped up and down, parodied square dance movements, or fulsomely collapsed on one another with deadpan faces, all to the delight of the audience. The success...
...prayer house, about as big as one of those very large doll houses in an F.A.O. Schwartz catalogue was as bare as could be except for a mat, a teapot, a tooth brush, and, disconcertingly, a stack of American comic books. I haven't any idea what they were doing there...
Eugene lonesco once admitted that he was a playwright of despair-otherwise, he said, "why do you think I have to be so funny?" The basic problem with Exit the King is that it is not funny enough to leaven the despair, and what comic spirit there is has been muffled in this Manhattan production by the APA Repertory Company. A 90-minute mood piece on the palpable fear of approaching death, the play has been given a sleepy rather than springy staging by Director Ellis Rabb. Instead of displaying regal authority and a poignant awareness of death, Richard Easton...
...falling in love, the boy having slept with the girl's mother. For the twenty minutes of The Graduate that chronicle the initial stages of the Benjamin-Elaine courtship, Nichols hits his stride, providing a relevant contemporary romance different from the Hollywood norm, apparently setting the scene for a comic examination of the inevitable ensuing conflicts...