Word: faulknerisms
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Requiem for a Nun. Nobel Prizewinner William Faulkner's play is not a model of playmaking, but it is feelingly and uncompromisingly written around the great themes of God, sin and redemption. With a notable cast headed by Ruth Ford and Zachary Scott...
Requiem for a Nun (by William Faulkner) is a journey through the dark night of the soul with a hint of dawn beyond. Its characters do not have the stature for tragedy, yet it is dense with guilt, pity and terror, and it frequently grips the audience in its palm like sinners in the hands of an angry...
...crib. Nancy is a Negro ex-prostitute, but her crime is a mere postscript to the horror-gorged life of her mistress, the dead child's mother, who is enslaved to the devil in the flesh. Mrs. Gowan Stevens was formerly Temple Drake, society-girl heroine of Faulkner's novel Sanctuary, to which Requiem for a Nun is a sequel. While the law has dealt with Nancy, it is the Furies of the past that hound Temple Drake...
...role of Temple Drake, expressly written for her by Faulkner, Ruth Ford is altogether memorable. She flicks out her lines with an invisible riding crop, aristocratic in disdain, febrile in sexuality, empty-eyed at the soul's abyss. Scott McKay plays husband Gowan with just the right blend of weak will and good intention. And Bertice Reading's Nancy is a mixture of smoldering dignity and rock-like faith...
True in feeling, Requiem is sometimes hollow in logic. Temple's behavior is baffling except in terms of innate depravity. Nancy's sinner-into-saint switch is an abuse of poetic license. But to a theater often governed by the spirit of commerce, Faulkner has brought a play whose commerce is solely with the human spirit in its torment, in its aspirations, and in its vagrant moments of nobility...