Word: glasers
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Their paces are admirable. The production is remarkably finished for a repertory company opening night. Every element works toward lucid characterizations. Everingham stands the characters in close confrontation: Raskolnikov (Paul Glaser) who murders to test a philosophy, stands in a limp full shirt and baggy trousers next to John Lithgow's ramrod prissy Luzhin, the rich, hollow financee of Raskolnikov's sister. The lines of character like the lines of John Braden's sets are balanced, clear and instantly defined. Bea Paipert creates two brief roles, the hunched, old pawnbroker Raskolnikov kills and a crazy madam at a police station...
...cameo characterizations at that. The production is a series of marvelous still photographs freezing colorful characters in revealing attitudes. There can be some movement within scenes: a first-act police station swarms with people, voices and crimes in a little masterpiece of Everingham's physical and vocal choreography. Glaser and Kramer, and Glaser and Miss Walker can move toward climax and depth in the confines of a single scene. But little holds the scenes together, and when in the third act the play enters its third hour at the same time as the pace of the scenes goes a little...
...internal suspense is fitfully hinted at by an occasional scream in Raskolnikov's mind, a staged hallucination or a spiderweb backdrop. But these are only in use sporadically and with a touch of embarrassment. They neither interfere nor work. Glaser is a skilled actor with a tormented voice and a hauntng face, but he doesn't have the time or the lines to hone the play into form with the tension of mind...
Director George Hamlin has made the staging posed and mannered, draping his actors in window arches and at ladies' feet, draping their faces with wigs and putty. The actors, for their part, cannot always keep the play's eloquence under control. Paul Glaser, as the hero crying to be hanged, is all forensic and fingerpointing, but often his gestures distract from his lines, and sometimes he loses the thread of the poetry in his forced jauntiness. Nancy McDoniel, the lady accused of witchcraft, smiles and enthuses as constantly as a Dickens heroine with never a trace of the wryness...
...submitting his resignation, Glaser predicted that the new facility "will constitute a key resource for the health care of large numbers of citizens and will also be an invaluable asset to teaching and health care research...