Word: harold
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Wanda June's modern-day Odysseus, mega-war hero and adventurer Harold Ryan who is played superbly by Mark Lupke returns home to New York in the early '70s after a seven-year hiatus But he finds that the world no longer glories in its romantic, violent heroes Nor is his white. Penelope (Nora Seton) a mindless devotedly passionate house wife any longer During her husband's long absence she has gone to college, presently she's being courted by two debonair suitors. Herb Shuttle (Doug Curtis) and Norbert Woodly (Andrew Atkinson...
...companions in heaven are Siegfried von Kanigswald (Mark Kingstone), "the beast of Yugoslavia" whom Ryan killed on one of his missions; and Mildred Ryan (Dina Michels), a former wife of Ryan who has turned to alchol and cynicism. In various monologues the two characters cut apart Harold Ryan for his curelty selfishness and sexual abnormalities. Both actors do the best that could be expected with their parts especially Michels who saunters on drunkenly and then saunters...
...instead of blending into a cohensive unit, the play becomes a potpourri of assorted themes and characters. Only occasionally do sparks ignite, but they only leaves the audience with an unquenched thirst for more. The conversation between Harold Ryan and his son Paul (Leo Luberecki) as Ryan tells of his adventures the audience of for a moment, as the pair's first-ever meeting proves moving. But the momentum doesn't last. Besides, we've seen enough housewives breaking out on their own and we've seen enough of macho men destroyed and replaced by the scientific, mechanized heroes...
...Wanda June. Some lines are crisp--like when Ryan tells us that "educating a beautiful woman is like pouring honey into a fine Swiss watch. Everything stops. "We laugh nervously as we wonder where the plot is taking us--and we discover the answer is nowhere. The world around Harold Ryan deteriorates as his wife, son, and friends leave him and he is left weaponless without his mind for his final battle with suitor Woodly. We watch Ryan struggle to salvage his own faith in himself. But, like Ryan, at the play's end, we've been brought from nowhere...
What do these people do, mostly? They talk. What is the play about, possibly? Birth and copulation and death (all offstage). This is not the only hint of T.S. Eliot's influence on Harold Pinter, since a good many of the lines have the weary, dying fall of Eliot's poems. Always in Pinter, the dialogue is the drama, and it follows a threefold pattern. The source of the first is his fondness for vaudeville, a predilection he shares with Samuel Beckett, a playwright Pinter vastly admires. The second is the inquisitorial mode: a character is grilled, mocked...