Word: dramatist
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Still and all, the play was the finest tragedy yet written in English, and it provided us with Shakespeare's first great female role. But I suspect even the dramatist himself had some doubts about his ability to handle tragedy at this stage of his career, for he lay the genre aside for some years and turned his efforts to penning a slew of histories and comedies. By no means would I wish to do without the play; it contains plenty of things to cherish, in addition to serving as the material for three masterpieces far greater than the play...
...course, any production succeeds or fails on the strength of its Romeo and its Juliet. Every director must confront a wellnigh insuperable difficulty: Shakespeare presents not just a tale of young love, but of adolescent love. The two lovers are teenagers, and they speak and act as teenagers; the dramatist left no doubt about this. Originally there was no special problem, since Juliet was played by a young boy, and great care was taken in the training of young performers generally...
...Frogs, as Aristophanes wrote it, is a kind of ironically motivated slapdash quest to restore a major dead dramatist to the ranks of the living. It might wryly be regarded as one of those periodic efforts to save the ailing theater. The god Dionysus (Larry Blyden) resolves to go down to Hades and bring back Euripides. In the Shevelove version, Bernard Shaw substitutes. As his companion, Dionysus takes along his obese, grumbling Sancho Panza-like servant Xanthias (Michael Vale). They have their slapstick encounters, not only with the cranky Charon, who speaks like a movie gold prospector, but with enticing...
...feel itself in water, space density, surrounded by all the natural objects this human being on the state creates with the aid of silence and fiction. It is an art of illusion, but it does not permit any trickery. The gestures must be pure, true and comprehensible. The Greek dramatist Lucian wrote: "The mime who is guilty of a false gesture commits a solecism with the hand...
...even to think about, the play is powerful, harrowing, grimly humorous and altogether absorbing. The cast, in its superbly graphic work, leaves nothing to be imagined or desired. One cannot guess from a work as distinctly person al as Creeps what David Freeman's precise future as a dramatist will be. But in this stubbornly resilient play, he holds up a mirror to the grievously wounded lot of some of our fellow humans and asks us to have the moral courage to face them as they...