Word: grazia
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Adams House Drama Society production of Hamlet "takes a line" too, but it's really an anti-line. The director, Poc de Grazia, wants to let all the characters come across as they are, not as Hamlet interprets them in his own head. This is fortunate because de Grazia also plays Hamlet, which might have otherwise led to a one-dimensional ego-trip production. There is thus no undirectional theme with all the characters a collective midwife to some zinging, overwhelming closing statement. Rather, the portrayals are loose and disjunct, and that serves finally to heighten the senselessness...
...Grazia plays Hamlet well. He destroys the fine line between Hamlet's "feigned" madness and the real madness that comes to envelop him, making them indistinguishable, except by arbitrary definition. He is always moving in frenetic anguish, yet retains a sense of the ridiculousness of his own actions and those of everyone else...
...always interesting to see how the ghost scenes in Shakespeare are played. De Grazia has Fletcher Word, a black actor, play the Ghost from atop a platform. Word dressed entirely in black, moves with a mime's precision through Oriental poses, enshrouded always in a huge cape. The effect is very striking...
...king in The Murder of Gonzago and the dead king's ghost in the play itself, one wonders if the murder is actually happening again. Because given the dramatic context, either both are real or neither is. In having the same actor play both the key "magic" roles, de Grazia adds an unusual mystical quality to good old Hamlet...
...LOVE: Love takes time. To court and love someone in a satisfactory manner is a game with many and time-consuming phases. Modern love affairs are reminiscent, according to Sebastian de Grazia, of business agreements: "No frills, no flowers, no time wasted on elaborate compliments, verses and lengthy seductions, no complications, and no scenes, please." Those who complain that girls these days are "easy" fail to understand that in a hectic age girls must accelerate to save time for both themselves and their male friends. People have not stopped making love any more than they have stopped eating...