Word: herman
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Julia's neighbors fail to realize that Herman lives one step ahead of the bill collectors and the people who want to buy him out of his bakery shop. Alienated from the charmed world of Rhett Butler and Scarlett O'Hara by the South's rigid social hierarchy, Herman empathizes with Julia and her fellow Blacks. "I'm white," he says, "did it give me favors and friends?" The guilt that tortures him is more personal than Julia's; Herman feels he has betrayed his family, particularly his mother, with his love for a Black woman...
...Herman's sister and mother, Gretchen Klopfer and Laurie Patton surmount the formidable task of transforming characters written as villains into people whose prejudices, though painfully unjustified, can still be understood. Klopfer gives young Anabelle unexpected sensitivity. More than just a racist bitch, Patton's aging matriarch is a woman who, unable to accept her status as "poor white trash," clings to a delusion of superiority, the dying idea of white supremacy. In contrast to Herman's identification with Blacks, his mother hates them because she needs someone to despise in the same way that she suffers the condescension...
...Julia's neighbors, the more sympathetic Black counterparts of Herman's mother and sister, Connie Sullivan, Valerie Graves and Kevin Porter poignantly capture the desperation of a people struggling to retain their self-esteem in the face of daily abasement. Unfortunately, Wanda Whitmore, as landlady Fanny Johnson, mugs, contorts, and overacts her way through a performance that recalls the conniving but ignorant Black stereotypes in Hollywood's old plantation films...
...subtle expressiveness of her Chaplinesque face and the easy grace of her gestures and movements lend her performance a naturalness that never fades though she remains on stage nearly every minute of the play. In Krieger and Thurston's most clumsily staged scene--a confrontation between Julia and Herman's mother that climaxes in a screaming match of racial slurs--Gonsalves delivers some of her most powerful lines upstage, her back to the audience; still she commands the scene. After her fight with Herman's mother, Gonsalves' face explodes in a mask of tearless rage that emphasizes the disgust...
While Gonsalves' forceful voice projects frustration and helplessness, her tone rarely changes, considerably weakening her scenes with Tom Saunders' Herman. Gonsalves' urgency, juxtaposed with Saunders' wooden-soldier gestures and flat line delivery, makes them appear more like uncomfortable acquaintances than intimate lovers...