Word: harpo
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...which has been riding particularly low in recent years, marriage doesn't really deserve such unrestrained vehemence. And Senelick is ruthless in his prosecution. Senelick has dealt with these love-hate relationships before. When fed up with what he considered the Loeb's non-theatrical organization, he founded "Harpo", the Harvard Producing Organization. Senelick choose for the inaugural performance "Married Alive"--a collection of three one-act farces on married life including George Bernard Shaw's Overruled, George Feydeau's Madame's Late Lamented Mother and Chekov's Wedding...
...Duck? divides a genre into four cavorters: Zeppo, once charitably labeled the Good Looking One; Harpo, Rumpelstiltskin with mild satyriasis; Chico, the Italian Defamation League; and the great, nay immoral Groucho. Under his pun-fulfilled guidance the boys carom delightfully from the primitive surrealism of The Cocoanuts on beyond that neglected antiwar pageant Duck Soup, to the classic double bill, A Day At The Races and A Night At The Opera...
PEOPLE in period costumes drift onto the stage. They start playing games, tag and such. A few laughs. Young, happy smiles. Meaningful interaction; instant commune. What, this pseudo-Grotowskian exercise crap, this is HARPO? But wait, that clown drooling into the bucket, the increasingly precise blocking pattern, the scene titles, then the impeccable cockney accents; this is pure Larry Senclick, the master of the rococo basics, Harvard's exponent of technical theatricality, a man who has an amazing talent for layering upon any script a tremendous variety of gimmicks, jokes, and cheap bits, and proceeding to hit them so hard...
Making people laugh for the sake of laughing is easy. Sustaining it for an entire evening is a neat trick. Senelick and his cast perform it admirably. Welcome back, HARPO, it's good to see someone around here who doesn't take himself so seriously...
Back in Boston, and in Cambridge, a similar problem exists. Lamentably, Harpo has vanished for a number of reasons, but among them is lack consistently exciting and varied plays to produce, of box-office excitement. Harpo in the past picked although the productions themselves were sometimes shakey. Perhaps their failure came when they tried to be most commercial. At any rate, it's back to musicals for Agassiz this term, which can be a great deal of fun, if one is lonely for company...