Word: flea
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Charies Playhouse-Georges Feydeau's farce, A Flea...
...these much-touted troupes, San Francisco's American Conservatory Theater, has now arrived in Manhattan. ACT is distressingly average, and its three-play fare is flaccidly representative of regional-theater programming: one funny (A Flea in Her Ear), one classic (The Three Sisters) and one warmed-over Broadway Provocative (Tiny Alice). When he worked off-Broadway, ACT'S director William Ball was a sensitive, scrupulous directorial craftsman (Under Milk Wood, Ivanov). With his own company, Ball has become a puppetmaster who makes his players dance more than they...
Like all of Chekhov, The Three Sisters is open to several interpretations, but to make it insipid, boring and silly requires Ball's gall as well as his company's ineptitude. As the guest director of Georges Feydeau's A Flea in Her Ear, Gower Champion manages to intrude defects on the play that it never possessed. Feydeau was to the French bedroom farce what Einstein was to the theory of relativity. With gimmicks and gaucherie, Champion botches all of Feydeau's intricately precise equations of who-is-sleeping-with-whom-be-hind-which-door...
Lehane also chronicles the vita activa of the flea as vaudevillian; the flea as athlete (one "can jump about 150 times its own length along, and about 80 times its length up"); the flea as spreader of plague and, in the case of the male, even as sexual tyrant. In mating, says Lehane, a man obviously sympathetic to the underflea, "he grasps her abdomen with his antennae, and sensuously brushes her parts with a wispy membrane. Then violence comes. Copulation lasts about three hours, sometimes as long as nine. ... So sharp and indelicate are the hooks and spines...
...mixed blessings of DDT and civic sanitation have given the flea a bleak outlook for the downhill third of the 20th century. Lehane's future looks far more promising...