Word: horganitis
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WHITEWATER by Paul Horgan. 337 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux...
Anyone's puzzle; everyone's novel: follow boyhood step by step, and try to fix the precise instant at which the enchanted became the ordinary. No writer solves the puzzle, which may account for its continued fascination. Novelist Paul Horgan might almost be playing with another man's board and pieces: a small dusty town in the Southwest; a sensitive young narrator who will live to be a writer; the narrator's friend, an athlete who falls to his death from the town's water tower; a rich widow who befriends the narrator and sends...
What makes Horgan's book unmistakably his own is the quiet thoughtfulness of his words. His gift for precise and unobtrusive prose has sustained him through eleven other novels (notably Everything to Live For and A Distant Trumpet). It has allowed the literary world to discover and then mislay him regularly during nearly 40 years of brisk activity...
THERE is little to say for the Boston production except that it is very fine. James Sharman has recreated O'Horgan's staging so well that I couldn't tell much difference between this Hair and the O'Horgan-directed Hair I saw in London last summer. (Sorry, but I can't compare the Boston company to the New York one, as I have not seen the original Broadway Hair. ) Some of the jokes have been updated (references to Nixon and peace symbols abound more than ever), and the singing voices of the leads-all unknowns-are exceptional...
Much credit is due to Obie-award winner Tom O'Horgan, Hair's first director, Actor Jonathan Kramer, a veteran of the Cafe La Mama Troupe. told me later that O'Horgan is "the most successful thing about Hair. His staging of the show covers up incredible weaknesses." But severe shortcomings are hardly visible. The choreography is excellent, and a controlled chaos in the dancing make the show realistic. The music is usually light and funny, but sometimes deep and moving as well. And the acting is superb...