Word: deeley
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Director Dan Riviera obviously understands Pinter, and his cast of three conveys that understanding to us. As Deeley, the husband, Kevin Grumbach is sometimes too stylized, his voice overly loud and brassy, his emphases not quite right. His Deeley verges too much on the ridiculous. Still, while clearly outclassed by Anna, he manages to appear pitiable in his defeat...
...witness a struggle between Deeley and Anna for the possession of Kate. Deeley knows the emptiness of his marriage with Kate, and he is driven to the wall by Anna's sinister exploitation of this weakness, in order to win Kate back to the sensual and aesthetic lesbian relationship of twenty years before. Deeley's counter-attacks turn on his attempt to establish his male dominance by fabricating past confrontations in which women are degraded. If he can force the two women to subservient roles, his validity as a husband will be unquestioned...
...ANNA DEGRADES Deeley in her recreations of the past, and tries to win Kate with sensuous appeals to a former closeness that has been denied to Deeley. Ultimately it is Kate who commands the most powerful position: she has only to say "No" to either or both of them. But she must first settle her own conflict between the powerful pressures exerted on her by the others, and the desire to withdraw into herself...
MICHAEL MARTORANO, as Deeley, holds up well through the skirmishes of the first act, succumbing as Anna woos Kate just before the curtain. But he crumbles early in the second act, just after he has dealt Anna a setback in their battle of mutual degradation. Deeley's heavy emphasis on second meanings and his lumbering, wounded desperation rob his words, his weapons, of the strength they had held in the first act. The veneer of civility, too, skillfully maintained in Act I, becomes a travesty earlier than it should...
...upset. Anna, commandingly portrayed by Eden Lee Murray, dominates the action through most of the last half of the play, with too much ease. Murray is particularly effective in her adroit modulation between pregnant verbal aggression and ostensibly pleasant urbanity. But the thoroughness with which she overcomes Deeley's attacks leaves us unprepared for Kate's final rejection of Anna...