Word: deathwatch
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...cast that gave Jean Genet's Deathwatch in Cambridge a year ago last spring, only Harold Scott '57 has been retained for the present, entirely new, New York production. Scott is better than he ever was, and this production is a good one. But the real importance of the occasion lies in that this play, which was introduced to America in Cambridge (kudos to John Eyre the introducer), exists on a stage again in all its striking significance...
There may be a whole underworld that shares the moral assumptions of Genet and his characters (it is clear from biographical and internal evidence that Genet has lived his life in the moral and physical world that Deathwatch portrays), but if so they are inarticulate and he is their voice. Genet can give us a new conception of the capabilities of the human soul. He is utterly different from normal, decent people, and that is his importance...
...also, in a sense, his defect as a dramatist. Since his audience can hardly sympathize with the most basic assumptions of his characters, the intensity of its reaction tends not to be proportional to the intensity of the emotions exposed onstage. For Deathwatch is really far out. Though such a dense, rich play does not easily lend itself to interpretive summary, it appears that Genet has attempted nothing less than a study of the metaphysics of evil...
Prepaid Signal. While Pius XII lay dying inside the cream-colored stone walls of Castel Gandolfo, his summer residence 15 miles southeast of Rome, 200 newsmen gathered for the courtyard deathwatch. United Press International rented a room on the square and dickered with a nun for the use of her telephone; the Associated Press signed up a village butcher's phone; reporters lounged in their cars or on cots and sleeping bags, drinking Cokes, shaving in the fountain. Rome's Italia news agency, mistaking a fluttering Gandolfo curtain for a prearranged, prepaid signal of the Pope...
Galeazzi-Lisi stood the deathwatch for four years. During the papal illness of 1954, he tried to peddle personal accounts of the Pope's life and illness. At his price -$12,000-and while the Pope lived, he found no takers. But his chance came when his patient died...