Word: cronyn
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What gives the evening a high polish is the cast. Anne Baxter plays the Italian princess and the former mistress with a likable and knowing broadness. Hume Cronyn's cigar-smoking millionaire sounds a bit too much like George Burns, but his Hugo is a masterpiece of foxy pomposity. Best of all is Jessica Tandy, first as the harridan in Maud and then as the great man's dry, abused wife. She endows the woman with an odd gallantry that Coward himself may have possessed...
...garrulous leak into the sands of death. The trivia of her handbag and stray threads of memory sustain her, together with a fossil of a husband who is scarcely seen and seldom heard. In Krapp's Last Tape, the dialogue is incestuous. A 69-year-old man (Hume Cronyn) communes with his recorded self of earlier birthdays and indulges a ravenous appetite for bananas. Krapp is another of Beckett's incorrigible gas bags, an amusing aspect of a playwright who has been so widely heralded for the austerity of his prose...
Speech is dispensed with in Act Without Words, in which Cronyn mimes the frustrations of a man lost in the desert who is variously tempted by water bottles that elude his grasp and ropes that foil his attempts to hang himself. The character is a kind of vaudeville Sisyphus, and one can thank Beckett for the small favor that the playlet lasts only ten minutes. Not I lasts 15. It is the seemingly final verbal spasm of a woman of 70 (Tandy) who recounts fragments of her life and concludes that even her suffering does not add up to much...
Despite a querulous vocal pitch, Jessica Tandy endows these tiny marine skeletons of drama with shimmering glints of life, and Hume Cronyn brings a gusto to his roles that adds flesh to their bones. But their admirable efforts are largely wasted. Life is a rum show, Beckett keeps on telling us. So, alas, are his plays...
...here they are, in LARC'S debut, three hungry, enormously attractive actors-Hume Cronyn, Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson-taking stylish licks at a play that has far more seasoning than substance. It is a generational saga of American life from the late 19th century to the present, a la Our Town, from Grover Cleveland and his mistress to Masters and Johnson. With obvious delight and gusto, the key actors play many men and women at various ages, and they are awfully good at it. The play concerns a clan that manufactures buttons, but Playwright Robison seems to have...