Word: dialectic
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Although Grania is the chief culprit, the three of them bark and bite at one other all night in a manner not unlike the Tyrones in Long Day's Journey into Night. Lady Gregory's penchant for folk dialect and fairly elaborate imagery prevent the encounters from being quite so acerbic, and give the characters a sort of distance. There's not an awful lot you can do with only two or three characters on stage, and director John Pym settles for movement that is simple and unobtrusive...
...Dixie dialect is artificial at times, and Jordan's version is not so consistently readable a modernization as J. B. Phillips' classic Letters to Young Churches. But Jordan's goal is sound: "The Scripture should be taken out of the stained-glass sanctuary and put out under God's skies...
Before Vic and Walter confront each other, a Jewish-dialect comedian totters onto the premises in the form of an 89-year-old furniture appraiser. Gregory Solomon, a kind of pickle-barrel philosopher, is as welcome for comic relief as he is dramatically irrelevant. As he haggles over the value of the furniture, Solomon (Harold Gary) makes wry, mocking comments about the family, marriage, his business competitors, serving as a kind of one-man Yiddish Greek chorus...
...cruel ruse, the CIA's team of writers resorted even to such time-worn tricks as the formless plot, the dialect joke, and the late-President slur. But again the audience refused to see its vision dashed, and the intelligence men's most basic weapon--mimic ability--carried the show. On top of which, the CIA as usual was technically flawless. The set it put together, even forgetting the incredibly short notice it had for last night's performance, was remarkable. So were the uniformly clever and colorful costumes. This being a commedia dell'arte with updated themes and references...
...freed after the Civil War. Some of his story seems to check out: Watkins was a common name in Liberia in the 1840s, and slave-ship records actually list two slave-ship captains named Legree. Charlie also recalls a few words of what has been identified as a Liberian dialect...