Word: dialog
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...stylistic problem of How I Won The War is the unintelligibility of a healthy chunk of its dialog. A lot of laughs must simply be drowned in garble...
...stage business in harness with Shakespeare's verbal wit or verbal wisdom. Often he finds success in pointing a line with a gesture, but sometimes too, his compositions are simply too full of movement for good focus. On a few occasions, he has literally obscured potentially funny or significant dialog by drawing the audience's attention to some simultaneous comic bit. In a single instance, he shows an excess of reverence to the lines, freezing an admirably raucous forest banquet to a tableau, while Jaques (Kenneth Tiger) puts the "Seven Ages of Men" through their paces. On balance, though...
Prince Erie boasts some of the finest dialog heard on a stage in-recent years. Mayer's speeches combine formal rhythms and precise images with deliberately chosen colloquialisms and small mistakes in grammar, both creating characterization and recreating the formal journalistic idiom of the period. Reporting the market crash, the Heraldreporter ends his news story with, "Threats against Fisk are freely indulged in." Fisk's early employer Daniel Drew prays, "Deliver me from the House of the Harlot, Lord, and from the rest of this here lewd company who don't give two bits for Thy commandments...
Mayer's inversions are often tragically funny in context; Drew again, on being excluded from the business operations: "Them boys is getting a damn sight too cute." Fisk's dialog masterfully combines bad grammar and vernacular with innumerable phrases from the Bible. "Poor suffering bastards," he yells at the crowd he has cheated, "You want your money? It has gone where the woodbine twineth...
Susan Channing as Josie Mansfield is perhaps too sophisticated given Mayer's dialog, but in the third act she is genuinely moving, and always extremely beautiful. As Ned Stokes, Fisk's romantic rival and assassin, Kenneth Shapiro skillfully conveys youth and attractiveness, while remaining intrinsically hollow and middle-class. Mayer knows that Stoke's aspirations to Fiskdom are pathetic and inevitably doomed to failure, and Shapiro gets this across...