Word: elia
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...ELIA KAZAN New York City
With apt and expressive detail, Inge has set his scene and animated it. Helped by extremely good acting, Director Elia Kazan has given the play a full-bodied, full-businessed stage life. A moment is tense, a scene is touching, the author obviously cares, the general effect is thoroughly his own. Yet the general effect has a somewhat ploppy, India-rubberlike impact. Playwright Inge's most definitive quality-his feeling for human lostness-becomes a little too insistent. It does not emerge from the characters; it tends, instead, to shape them. In the circumstances, the play's very...
...action is fully directed by Elia Kazan, whose extremely skilled hand is, if anything should be said against it, somewhat obvious. Thus the exaggerated poses of the boy toward his mother--for example, covering her body with his on the floor--are sometimes strained. But as a whole, especially in getting actors to work together, Kazan reaffirms his right to his reputation...
...plotting. Playwright Kazan, onetime play reader for the Theatre Guild and wife of Director Elia Kazan, must eventually abandon action for argument. This means a drop in dramatic force. Thus, when the student unequivocally assures his worried benefactor that he is not a Communist, he seems morally much more horrifying than when, later on, he gives all the reasons why he is one. In the last act The Egghead becomes a lively enough symposium, but in any creative sense it really ceases to be a play...
Face in the Crowd (at the University Theatre through Saturday). Elia Kazan slashes furiously at TV and the Madison Avenue promotion men in this tale of a good-for-nothing jailbird who becomes a potent national force. Andy Griffiths gives a magnificent performance, and Patricia Neal turns in the finest job of her career...