Word: hauptman
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AUTHOR WILLIAM Hauptman has an American history fixation stronger than Bernard Bailyn's. Last year the American Repertory Theatre (ART) mounted his Big River, a dramatization of America a la Huck Finn. It proved an effective combination: Hauptman's middle-brow dramatic sensibilities were perfectly in key with Twain's wise hicks...
...Twain were alive today, he certainly would have written about Gillette. A real-life town in the real-life state of Wyoming, Gillette's brief history as a low-life. Mecca combined the worst features of "The Dodge City Story" and "Newark Today." Hauptman believes he has discovered in this town that most prized of creatures, the metaphor. Unfortunately, he has only come across a setting, or at best a case study...
Gillette the play, however, is injured by Hauptman's desire to explore fully Gillette the non-existent metaphor The springs and wires of Hauptman's plot are so obvious that the set deserves some telegraph lines in the background. It seems as though the play was plotted first, with characters added as an afterthought. A case in point: Cherry Jones's first appearance as Jody Bobby's blue denim romantic obsession is very funny she's a biker's moll with a nuclear war phobia and a vearning for a little TECC. when sheappears next, she has undergone a complete...
FORTUNATELY, THIS play quite a bit less than the sum of its parts An excellent dialoguesmith, Hauptman distributes juicy one-liners with admirable magnanimity (a prostitute recalling her decision to hit the street says "I realized I was sitting on a gold mine"). Hauptman's generosity keep the laughs rolling, but at the cost of reducing his characters to sitcom personalities. Hauptman's attempts to add a few moments of drama completely collapse; characters who whip out quips at the pace of a Noel Coward cannot carry a dramatic scene...
...MODERN American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." Ernest Hemingway once remarked Roger Miller and William Hauptman's Big River is an attempt to bring nearly all of that book on stage--an ambitious transplanting, to say the very least. Rather than amplifying a few key events or themes of the story. Big River presents most of it as a series of vignettes interspersed with musical numbers. Some of the scenes work splendidly, drawing on the sardonic, slapstick and drawling wit of the original story. Others, however, become a tribute to Cliff...