Word: count
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...underneath a patently fake proscenium, upstage; in the wings, stretching around the audience are the kitchens, dressing rooms and lofts of the servants; and most of the action, appropriately enough, occurs in the middle ground. Figaro's wedding procession winds through the audience and the several rendezvous in the Count's garden take place under green-and-white nets hung from the ceiling as a sort of makeshift forest. Epstein's staging and Edmunds' design, in other words, are as inventive as Beaumarchais' plot...
...first time this season, though, the individual A.R.T. performers do not match the precision of the rest of the creative team. Their errors are of emphasis, not conception: Shalhoub's Figaro, feisty and engaging in his monologues, seems too resentful and angry in his battle of wits with the Count--his "high spirits" reach only middling altitudes. As he counters the Count's designs on his bride-to-be Suzanne with plots of his own, he acts more like an lago than a Prospero. Karen Macdonald's Suzanne follows his lead--spleen overbalances sweetness. Harry Murphy's smug Count...
...figure out why it's also unsettling. Epstein has managed to underscore the class tensions in the play without turning it into a Marxist dialectic, and wherever Beaumarchais' introduces a didactic speech. Epstein finds ways for his characters to deliver it naturally. Each character, in turn--except the Count--gets to spout off about his oppression; and those who believe women's issues are a 20th-century invention will note that Marceline (Barbara Orson), who starts the play as Figaro's nemesis, offers a sympathetic monologue that we can only call feminist...
...strides from seat-top to seat through the empty first rows of the auditorium, with all the precarious confidence of his social-climbing instinct--then hops down, nods furtively and scurries by the legs of the audience with some submissive mutters of "excuse me." The moment when the jealous Count gives Cherubino an army officer's commission to remove him from the scene--immortalized by Mozart in his mock-heroic, trumpet-and-drum aria "Non piu andrai..."--Epstein appropriates for a bit of grisly realism: Figaro grabs Cherubino by the shoulders and shakes him into an awareness of the horrors...
Heavy outlays for defense spending, in addition to the cost of energy and debt repayment, have fueled Israel's economic crisis. In 1980 the country's military security cost $5.4 billion, fully 31% of the $17.7 billion budget-and that does not count $1.4 billion in military aid from the U.S. to allay losses from the peace treaty with Egypt. Israel's war machine is formidable. The Israel Defense Forces (I.D.F.) has grown immensely since the traumatic weeks of the 1973 October War. The armed forces now number 169,000, with 252,000 reservists ready to report...