Word: harpo
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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...
...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...