Word: harriet
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...credit of the actors, though, they manage to create worlds within themselves, leading to an almost incongruous comic machine in the form of Ilana Kurshan's Harriet, sister to Sylvia. Her mole like searching head and wide eyes cast light on the otherwise dour proceedings, while providing a kind of insider's guide to the marriage. At the same time, though, even Kurshan acquires a police-witness-feel in her casual chat with a gumshoe Hyman. Young Lee '99, as Phillip's boss whose pet project is adding a spiffy annex to the New York Harvard Club, reaches similar comic...
Children who take tours of the landmark walk upon the building's original 19th-century floor planks and enjoy puppet shows with three-feet puppets portraying escaped slaves Harriet Tubman and Lewis Hayden, all recreating the Underground Railroad...
...play begins when David (Marshall Lewy '99), Ozzie and Harriet's oldest son, returns home from the Vietnam War and is dropped off by a stiff military soldier (Greg David '99). David is now blind: this unexpected circumstance throws a damper on the joy of the family. Each character changes in some way: success-driven yet lonely Ozzie recalls his youth and maliciously derides his own children; Harriet can no longer fix each situation simply by offering snacks to everyone or calling her priest, Father Donald (Rich Amberg '00); and Ricky (Joshua Cohen '97) simply avoids unpleasant situations by leaving...
...that he was in love with what they call a "yellow whore." Ozzie, disturbed by his son's serious relationship with Zung, spitefully proclaims at one point: "They got diseases...he touched 'em. That's disgusting," and later says that David just wanted to have "little, bitty, Chinky kids." Harriet says, in a disturbingly soft, coddling tone, of Vietnamese people, "Their poor funny little faces...Human faces weren't meant to look like that.... It is our triumph, our whiteness...
...undercurrents of unhappiness and angst grow stronger as the play continues, and tense interludes break up moments of comedy which recall the original "The Ozzie and Harriet Show." The deft interspersing of the serious with the comic can best be appreciated when the audience responds to the jokes and follows the premise of the play to its gory end. The play's ending reveals the cruel absurdity of the characters' attitudes by taking them to their logical extreme. Eventually, David can no longer coexist with his family: his perspective on life has been so altered by his bittersweet experience...