Word: hermia
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...play opens, the Athenian courtiers strut about the stage like so many automatons, suggestive of "a timeless urban environment," as the embarassingly pretentious program notes put it. Hermia and her lover Lysander wish to be married, against the will of Egeus, her father, who wants Hermia to marry Demetrius. Hermia and Lysander decide to leave Athens and be married in the woods outside the city. Helena, a friend of Hermia, learns of her plans and tells Demetrius, knowing he will follow Hermia into the woods where Helena hopes to seduce him. The four flee restrictive-but-orderly Athens...
...workmen rehearsing a play in the woods--are gems of acting and direction. In fact, the acting in this production is without exception good. Dan Breslin gives an outstanding performance as the hyperenergetic, cackling Puck, flawlessly capturing the playful and devilish facets of Puck's mischief. Teresa Barger as Hermia and Joanna Blum as Helena are very much the respectively sought-after and frustrated lovers, and vice-versa. Anne B. Clarke as Titania fairly wafts across the stage. Tim Reuben is an appropriately ponderous Theseus, and Jeffrey Rothstein, struggling valiantly with a wrinkled, Bozo-esque bald-cap, nevertheless succeeds...
...directors clearly stressed diction, for the actors speak with great precision, making this easier to understand than most undergraduate productions of Shakespeare. But Monica Bachner as Hippolyta is too mechanical in her delivery, sacrificing inflection for clarity. Tim Sellars plays Hermia's lover Lysander well, but is handicapped by his boyish cuteness. Sellars looks too much the blonde California surfer. He delivers his lines with feeling, but we can't help thinking that if Hermia threw him over, he'd just as soon hop into his dune buggy and cruise down the beach until he found a new place where...
Outlet for Energy. Hermia's altruism is untypical of Compton-Burnett's predatory female dictators. Eliza is more in character: "Autocratic by nature, she had become impossibly so, and had come to find criticism a duty, an outlet for energy." When Hamilton's first letter of proposal to Hermia arrives, Eliza wants to answer it herself. When a second comes, she opens it and attempts to hide it. Like her predecessors in earlier books, Eliza is not only shameless, but awash with grandly rhetorical self-pity: "Years of care, of asking little for myself and accepting less...
...Last and the First departs from the author's past works, it is in its relative compassion. Not that Dame Ivy went soft. But she endowed Hermia, a powerful woman, with both a healthy outlook and a promising future. In a way, like Eliza, she was surrendering some of her sovereignty over her people, and a little welcome warmth came...