Word: elizabethan
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Writer-director Andrew Bergman, no doubt a student of Shakespeare, has structured this comedy according to the truest Elizabethan standards of the form. All the elements are there, and in their proper places: a young protagonist, who starts out naive and ends up worldly; a humourously complicated love-at-first-sight affair, complete with bawdy slapstick; a "unifying theme" (quite a pleasant surprise for comedies of late); and, of course, the happy ending where everyone gets married...
...there is a genius among the storytellers of 1981, it is J. O'Callahan, from Marshfield, Mass., a man of such poetry, wit and elegance that, even in a rugby shirt, he seems Elizabethan. O'Callahan writes his own superb stories. The Herring Shed, told from the point of view of a 14-year-old girl learning the mysteries of her first job in Nova Scotia during the darkest days of World War II, is a minor masterpiece of coming-of-age literature. As she strings up her fish to dry, O'Callahan's young narrator...
...sardonic Brechtian version placed in our own time--a fascinating show, but a failure. Now Coe has avowedly set out to rely almost wholly on the words and the audience's imagination (as the text itself repeatedly states), and to avail himself of a physical stage and props approaching Elizabethan simplicity. Coe has thus echoed the assertion of Schoenberg, high priest of atonal composition, that 'there is still much good music to be written in C major,' and of Mies van der Rohe, the renowned architect, that 'less is more...
...assigned the set and costume designs to Robert Fletcher '45, who worked on the AST's first two shows and a couple more since then. Fletcher has chosen to continue the wooden panelling of the auditorium's side walls across the front of the theatre to create an Elizabethan tiring-house facade. A flat Tudor arch in the center is symmetrically flanked by two doors. Up above is a sizeable gallery that can be curtained, with window openings at both sides. There are a few modest decorations--trefoils and four-leaf flowers, along with a blue-and-gold fleur...
...jumble, to be sure. Loaded with subterfuge, hidden identities, cloistered maidens, reprobates, fops, split-second marriages, and a Duke ex machina, Measure for Measure is a grabbag of Elizabethan dramatic tricks. Set in Vienna where, in the absence of the Duke, the deputy Angelo is ruling with impeccable stridency, the play is loosely concerned with the fate of the libertine, Claudio, who must pay for an indiscretion with his head in order to serve notice that the law long lax under the Duke, now has new metal in it. As Claudio awaits execution in his jail cell, however, the real...