Word: hearning
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Touchstone (not found in the source novel) is Shakespeare's first intentional fool, a character the playwright would vastly improve on in Twelfth Night, All's Well, and King Lear. It is a tribute to George Hearn's skill that, with rouged cheeks and polychrome doublet, he makes this satirizing role better than it really is; and he fully merits the applause his speech on duelling elicits...
...John Hale, who in fact received both a bachelor's and master's degree. An expert on demonology, Hale starts off siding with Danforth, but in the course of the play undergoes moral growth. He comes to harbor doubts about the trials, and winds up denouncing them. George Hearn handles this vital role commendably. But Wyman Pendleton turns Judge John Hathorne into too much of a caricature of Hercule Poirot...
...Leontes's opposite number, Polixenes, who first suffers injustice and later commits it, George Hearn is an admirable successor to Jack Ryland, although he is not wholly at home in Shakespearean speech. Josef Sommer, absent from the AST for several seasons, is back, once more giving the impression that he was born speaking the Bard's language. This year he is Camillo, the lord who links the worlds of the two kings; and his performance is exemplary (except that the director still insists on substituting the word "undress" for the correct "discase...
...John Hearn Guelph...
Cheap laughs won in this easy way merely emphasize Shakespeare's use of characters as megaphones. His words are what matter, and of the cast only Oberon (George Hearn) and Titania (Kathleen Widdoes) can get their tongues round blank verse. This raises an overdue point. William Shakespeare has done a lot for Joseph Papp. Surely, Papp could return the compliment and insist that actors be given voice lessons when he mounts a Shakespeare play at one of the seven Manhattan theaters under his dominion. Gina Mallet