Word: grusha
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Caucasian Chalk Circle, currently being produced by the Harvard Law School Drama Society, boldy pits the bourgeois authority--manifested in the persons of the governor of a Caucasian Village and his wife--against the simple stolidity of the proletariat, in the person of Grusha, their servant girl. The backdrop is the bloody imbroglio of civil war. Grusha, simply and sincerely portrayed by Brooke Stark, retrieves the governor's child. Michael, who has been left behind in the frenzied exodus from the Village. She protects the baby throughout the conflict, risking her personal safety as well as her love...
...CAST, although generally competent, particularly warms to their roles during the last scene, which-appropriately enough for a law school audience--takes place in a courtroom. From an epic style in the earlier portion of the play. Brecht shifts nimbly to parable. Grusha must contend with the haughty mother over who will gain possession of the child. Azdak, the magistrate-rogue, played with animation by David Miller, gives the "chalk-circle test." Grusha lets go of Michael because she doesn't want to hurt him "I brought him up! Should I tear him apart...
BRECHT'S Caucasian Chalk Circle is yet another of his sagas of strong proletarian women fighting for a better world, women who retain their belief in goodness despite bourgeois disorder and chaos. One sees echoes of Grusha's stamina in Brecht's Mother Courage and St. Joan. If the world is to be saved in Brecht's eyes, it will be saved by Women--suffering pours iron into their veins. They have been through hell and back, yet they come out smiling...
...production beautifully. Occasionally Cindy Rosenwald, the director, seems to seek it explicitly--in a stylized slapstick quarrel between the governor's son's two frightened doctors, for example. But just as effectively, most of the time she lets it grow naturally out of the comedy of the play--in Grusha's marriage with a purportedly dying peasant, for instance, where the musicians have to play "something that could be either a subdued Wedding March or a spirited Funeral Dirge." Rosenwald even makes Grusha's flight on a rotting bridge spanning a 2000-foot abyss convincing, with a little help from...
Nearly all Rosenwald's actors are also excellent, most of them in several different roles, although Tom Yellin, Charles Weinstein, Jomo Schur, Kristen Wiley, and especially Mary Tisco seemed to me to stand out the most. Suki Taylor is a remarkably winning Grusha. Neal Solomon dominates things whenever he's on stage, as the profane and bribe-demanding judge whose tenure is remembered as a brief golden age of justice because he's willing to fine for atheism the rich farmers who don't like miraculous explanations for their provisions' presence in a poor peasant's larder--"I ask Your...