Word: elena
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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NATALIA GINZBURG's The Advertisement is a play about what can happen to people who answer Real Paper classifieds. A young student in Rome named Elena responds to an ad offering free room and board in return for companionship. As a result, she is forced to listen to the long neurotic monologues of her host, Teresa; falls in love with Teresa's estranged husband, Lorenzo; and finally gets shot to death...
...play is practically a single speech an hour long. Teresa, very well played by Amy Moss, pours out the story of her life, sloppily, like soup overflowing a saucer--her nightmares, unhappy childhood, financial problems, and unrequited love for her husband. "Is all this boring you?" she asks Elena (Anne Singer)--a risky suggestion for an author to make to an audience when presenting this kind of familiar material. But Ginzburg carries it off, and instead of sounding like your roommate's version of hell at Harvard, the first act is hypnotic and convincing...
...turns out, Teresa is so convincing about the virtues of her husband that the moment Lorenzo (Henry Lie) shows up, Elena falls in love with him. Rich, pretentious, and dated, he drags Teresa down to his own level of platitudes and the play begins to sound inane. ("She's as boring as a bottle of olive oil." "I didn't know olive oil was boring.") Things begin to happen fast, but the play goes off balance once the static, dreamy atmosphere of the first act is left behind. The rest of the play ignores the social and sexual issues raised...
...century Palermo, where the French colonists are oppressing the Sicilian natives. Arrigo, one of the principal revolutionaries, discovers to his horror that he is the illegitimate son of the chief oppressor, Montforte. Not only does this news test his divided loyalties, but it ruins his romance with the fair Elena, who is sympathetic to the Sicilians. With loud cries of "Vendetta!" the Sicilians overthrow Montforte at the final curtain...
...basses. What a surprise, though, to discover the power of the quartet and chorus with which Verdi concludes the second act - a moment of grand confrontation in which every body perceives everybody else's seeming treachery. Or to find that Verdi has rarely written anything lovelier than Elena's farewell to Arrigo, "Ah, parli a un core." Spinning out its delicately chromatic cantilena like the mistress of cantabile that she is, Soprano Caballe stopped the show for a full two minutes and 45 seconds. The applause ceased only when Caballe held up a palm and signaled Levine...