Word: dunnock
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Brian Bedford, the Shakespearean veteran who won a Tony nomination last year for Timon of Athens, has the central role in both plays. In the first, School for Husbands, he's the overprotective guardian of a young woman (Patricia Dunnock) whom he intends to marry. She, however, has other plans-namely, getting the guardian to unwittingly bring her together with the younger fellow she really loves. Bedford, wearing long Ben Franklin locks and mugging dryly to the audience, helps overcome the sense that these are stock characters whom Moliere would develop more fully in later works...
David Ackroyd as George is the archetypal history professor, who speaks solemnly, holds forth portentously and submits wordlessly to his small-scale destiny. David Macdonald is suitably well-muscled as Nick, but isn't very convincing during his more intelligent outbursts. Patricia Dunnock is far too annoying and babyish as Honey for us to really feel the horror of her climactic drunken confession. It seems a mistake for director Larry Arrick to make Honey and Nick so ludicrously two-dimensional, for it undermines the true cruelty of George and Martha's manipulations if we feel Honey and Nick aren...
...prevailing mood of this play is that of a fitful breeze stirring faded autumn leaves. Its central figure is an old woman (Mildred Dunnock) haunted by her impending death. She ruminates on many things and, like the play itself, comes to grips with none. Known only as "The Mother," she talks of old age, of passions spent and love unrequited, of parenthood and the serpents' teeth of thankless children. Since the play was originally written some 20 years ago by French Novelist, Dramatist and Film Writer Duras, it is very much in the theater-of-the-absurd tradition...
They are up to it. Dunnock unfalteringly reveals the interwoven strands of love and hate in a mother's heart, and Joseph Maher is splendid in conveying the sleazy, yet captivating charm of one of life's eternal dropouts...
Kate Reid's Big Mama is hyperactive, rowdy, and gross. This is far different from Mildred Dunnock on Broadway, but it is closer to what Williams indicates in the text, where Big Mama is likened to a "Japanese wrestler." Miss Reid has a way of sitting with her legs apart in a most unladylike fashion, and vomits the word "crap" so as to make it seem the vilest word ever invented. Her characterization makes Big Mama and Big Daddy almost two of a kind--which is something of a novelty...