Word: harpo
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Harpo's choices of plays for production are never haphazard. The choice of this play of Brecht's seems particularly sensitive. Harpo is committed to do plays as much the way they were written as possible. Director Laurence Senelick must then intend Drums in the Night primarily as a statement about Weimar Germany. I have no real way of knowing how well he succeeds. The play seems like what Weimar seems like, anomie everywhere, drunken revelry, heavy humor, recrimination and insecurity. Anna's super bourgeois parents, played by Martin Andrucki and Raye Bush, are convincing, and though they are without...
...Harpo's Drums in the Night is saying something about America. The satire of bourgeois revolutionaries, their quixotic attachments, seems particularly appropriate for a modern American audience. So do the caricatures of bloated warmongering pigs. In fact, it all seems close enough to reality that one wonders just where the satire lies. And when we, like Brecht before us, will come to a better understanding of our predicament...
...love Kaufman and Hart, and I love the thirties. But the Harpo production of You Can't Take It With You endows its characters with the fatal fruit of self-knowledge: it's a classic example of "camping." Instead of giving us the original and allowing the dislocation in time and space to provide the boffs, we are presented with a modern, hip conception of the thirties. The ingenue is not just "lovely, fresh, and young," as Messrs. K. and H. described her: Kent Wilson's Alice is a veritable Breck poster girl, a walking Palmolive ad, a cutie...
...always doing something, and some of the bits (Rheba scratching her head with a work while setting the table, Kolenkhov absently clipping threads from his cuffs with a cuticle scissors) are tremendously successful. The timing can have Marx Brothers accuracy (it can also be unbearably sluggish, something that the Harpo troupe might well improve during the summer Agassiz run). But the production is a 1title too cute, and some of the actors create dreadful characters that seem carved out of soap, so that finally the message of the play-a plea for leisure in a suicidal, capitalistic world-becomes lost...
...Harpo's production of Oedipus makes a similar statement about the bogus exaltation of human tragedy to cathartic spectacle, wherein great men fall from pinnacles in the all-seeing determinist universe of the Fates. Director Laurence Senelick has chosen the Seneca version over the traditional Sophocles "to remove the play from the realms of both Freudian psychology and aloof neo-classicism." This may also mean that he has chosen a play which, because of its gore and violence, leads to a denial that there is anything more in suffering than suffering; a denial that tragedy can be uplifting in transcending...