Word: coonrod
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
written by Christopher Durang, directed by Karin Coonrod...
Director Karin Coonrod must be given credit for taming this tornado of a play. Performed as part of the A.R.T.'s CrossCurrents initiative, an ongoing attempt to "create and sustain a body of new music theatre works," The Idiots Karamazov intersperses cabaret-style singing with its mad dash through practically all the Western fiction and drama worth reading. But an experiment in Brechtian musical theater this is not. With love ballads about the loss of Christian morality that come across as even more depressing than Tom Stoppard's musings in Jumpers and show-stoppers about the benefits of being...
...Coonrod's direction is so focused and so obviously imbued with energy that it's almost impossible not to get caught up in the sheer joy of the production, even if you can't get that third reference to Freud. But in willing the play into a coherent whole, Coonrod seems to miss at points the sadness that lies beneath Durang's outrageous humor, his underlying pity for characters forced to drag the corpses of their fathers through scene after scene. Their actions may be laughable, but they're not so far from the pains we in the "real" world...