Word: heartbreaking
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...final performance of Heartbreak House will be given tonight at 8:30 p.m. at Agassiz. Tickets are on sale at the Coop and at the door...
Certainly, however, East House does little to enhance Shaw's long, difficult, and extremely complex drama. Heartbreak House consists of one part cheerful irrelevancies, one part the disillusionment of Ellie Dunn, and one part allegory. Most of the time, the irrelevancies are wound around Ellie's awakening and her spiritual marriage to Captain Shotover. At selected intervals, however, the script in effect announces, "And now--back to our allegory." The transitions are strained at best, and the East House production does not ease them much...
...extraneous noises were about two-thirds Garden St. traffic and one-thirds Garden St. traffic and one-third backstage foul-ups. Hector's strange speech patterns, as elucidated by Donald Lyons, are without known cause. It may seem a pointless quibble to mention the surface noise; but Heartbreak House is not the first play ever given in Agassiz, and it is the height of sloppiness not to know the auditorium's accoustical possibilities and impossibilities by opening night...
There are more serious flaws, however, including an almost total lack of directing. At the play's end, when the planes are flying over Heartbreak House and bombs are falling, the East House show crumbles right before your eyes. The play proceeds at an agonizingly slow pace until the final scene; then it races at breakneck peed over important and meaningful lines. The actors overact and over-scream consistently throughout most of the play; then there is an almost total lack of noise of excitement when the bomb falls. The bomb itself hits with a ping, instead of with...
East House deserves credit, at least, for trying such a difficult play for its first production. But by the time the planes fly over Heartbreak House near the end of the play, everyone knows the bomb dropped three hours...