Word: duerrenmatt
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...Duerrenmatt, not writing his play with the Tufts Arena Theatre in min, wrote a stage direction that calls for the body to be on stage and in view of the audience. Director Harry M. Ritchie has thought about the stage direction, has thought about the physical limitations of his theater, and moved the corpse so that you can't avoid...
Ritchie, though, deserves much of the credit for the success of this show. The Physicist is immensely difficult to produce successfully, because Duerrenmatt clearly wants it to be an educational, as well as a theatrical experience, a any good post-Brechtian European playwright would. But he, like Brecht, is a natural dramatist; you automatically empathize with these wacky . So Duerrenmatt could hardly accept idea that an audience must be made to detach itself from the play completely -- forced not to empathize with the characters, but only to think about them...
...Duerrenmatt meets Brecht halfway. He cannot write a drama that does not excite sympathy, any more than Brecht could himslef. So he uses the sympathy he creates to set up the kind of didactic theatre Brecht talked about. To return to the example of the body in the doorway: to have to walk over that actress labels her an effect. It creates a detachment and prevents the building up of a mystery-story suspense as the play begins; Duerrenmatt trusts that the suspense will develop but itself. At the end of the act, another body is on the floor...
BOOTHBAY, ME., Boothbay Playhouse: The Physicists. Three atomic scientists in an insane asylum try to outmad each other. Swiss Playwright Friedrich Duerrenmatt probes the problem of the trio's moral responsibility for the destructiveness of their discoveries...
...Duerrenmatt's che sera sera fatalism is colored by a little wit, less eloquence, and the kind of oracular vision that informs playgoers that the work of atomic scientists might doom the human race. Cronyn, Tandy, Voskovec and, most especially, Robert Shaw, perform with the unerring precision of fine Swiss watches, but they are sealed in an intellectual Swiss cheese...