Word: danton
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...during the student movement of the 1830's. But his plays have survived, and Sabel revives Buchner very much in the context of the personal philosophy that the plays express. In fact, the playwright is cast in a role much like that of the hero in his greatest play, Danton's Death. Sabel's Buchner is, like Buchner's Danton, a passive hero in a play that creates no huge dramatic conflicts. Restrained from political action not by an intellectual's fear of soiling his hands, but rather by a prophetic sense of the futility of voluntary action against...
...also captured Che's diaries and decoded messages, which clearly showed that Debray (whose guerrilla code name was "Danton") was no mere journalist...
Their first production, Danton's Death, was nearly their own, critically speaking. Afterward, when Blau was asked if the reviewers were out to get the new team, he replied: "Nonsense. The knives are always out for you. The only way to deal with it is to be powerful in your art." Last week, five productions and long knives later, Blau admitted that his art had had a total power failure...
...this season, Gottfried has informed his readers that "Arlene Francis has the vocal range of a telephone dial tone," that Pickwick's "cast, whether it is singing, dancing, talking or just plain standing around, always seems to be just plain standing around," and that the Danton's Death lead, Alan Bergmann, "has a face that not even a fly could twitch-there is not an expression, a glance, an emotion that could cross it (not even, I suspect, a shadow...
...these themes might have stung the play into fitful life if it were not smothered in rhetoric. Danton inhales moral smog and exhales bombast. Herbert Blau is credited with translating the German; he has assuredly embalmed the English. Thanks to Blau, Robespierre has been given an outward resemblance to Barry Goldwater. This is a political subtlety fully worthy of the mentality that-in a since-deleted program note-linked Lyndon B. Johnson and Mao Tse-tung as fellow tyrants. Thanks to Blau, too, the direction resembles a wind machine blowing actors around like autumn leaves...