Word: danton
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...Producer Otto Preminger. "Marvelous and effective," said Playwright Alan Jay Lerner. So, last week, with a popping of flashbulbs and champagne corks, the Vivian Beaumont Theater, latest unit to join Manhattan's Lincoln Center, swung into orbit with its opening production, Georg Buechner's 130-year-old Danton's Death...
...Danton's Death, by Georg Buechner. Physically, the Vivian Beaumont Theater, the Lincoln Center Repertory's new home, is resplendent (see SHOW BUSINESS). Financially, this theater company is the richest in the U.S. Dramatically, it is bankrupt. Under its new directors, Herbert Blau and Jules Irving, Lincoln Center begins its third season by patting together another of a seemingly endless series of dramatic mudpies...
...Danton's Death is Buechner's stab at planting Hamlet in the middle of the French Revolution. Compared with Buechner's hero, Shakespeare's is a prince of action and a man of few words. Buechner's straw man is a compulsive blabbertongue who would rather rant than fight. The play is a petrified forest of conflicting themes. It can be variously regarded as a study in revolutionary disillusionment, an attack on revolutionary fanaticism or a defense of revolutionary intransigence. Danton can be seen as victim or traitor, Robespierre as scourge or hero, or both...
...large measure the failure of the spring season at the Loeb, which reportedly set record lows on ticket sales, results from the choice of plays. Buechner's Danton's Death proved far too rhetorical, and a play with a passive protagonist must inevitably drag. James A. Culpepper's Phyllis Anderson Award-winning Treason at West Point combined inept dialogue and inadequate characterization. It was barely competent. Anthony Graham-White's adaptation of Johnson, Marston, and Chapman's Eastward Ho! had more potential--it suffered most from a lack of good comic actors. But the play is hardly an old standby...
Admittedly, a yearbook is a difficult form. And the editors of 329 have wisely shifted their emphasis. But they must now shift the quality of the yearbook. One of their best innovations, a photo essay on the staging of "Danton's Death," reflects their problem. Like so much in 329 execution does not equal idea; the picture sequences are unfocused, the text uninspired. As the author writes...