Word: horowitz
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...applause for the Trinity Square Repertory Company's superb production of Israel Horowitz's Alfred the Great dies down and the audience begins to file out of the theater while the house lights come up, one feels slightly cheated--as if after savoring a fine appetizer the waiter has come to say that the main course will be indefinitely delayed. The appetite has been whetted and the palate prepared for a meal that never comes...
Alfred the Great is the first part of a trilogy by Horowitz entitled The Wakefield Plays. The second and third parts, Our Father's Failing and Alfred Dies, will be staged at the Trinity Square Theater in Providence, Rhode Island, some time before 1977. What Boston audiences are now seeing at the Wilbur Theatre is the extremely promising first act of a still to be completed three act drama. Alfred the Great, when seen by itself, ultimately fails as an independent work of art, but in part one Horowitz gives indications of the originality and strength of his dramatic imagination...
...play is saved from being overly grave and melodramatic by Horowitz's fine ear for both the poetic and comic rhythms of natural speech. His characters speak that elliptical language made familiar by Pinter--a series of monologues that only rarely intersect, made up of short-circuited sentences, non-sequiturs and repetitions. The special idiom of the absurdist play demands from its actors a particular sensitivity to the purely aural qualities of speech as well as split-second timing and O'Brien never lets his cast miss a beat...
...dingy walls and sparse furnishing of his interior but somehow he fails to convey the sense that this is a distinctly American environment. Instead, the setting seems more suited to Pinter's Birthday Party than a play set in New England in 1974. Without being insistent or exclusive, Horowitz addresses himself to some peculiarly American obsessions and drives in Alfred the Great and it is important that the environment his characters inhabit reflects this...
Alfred the Great remains only a beginning--we need to know the middle and the end of the Wakefield Cycle before we can really judge whether Horowitz has made a dramatic statement of enduring value. Part one ends just as the last layers of deceit and delusion are being torn away. The process of self discovery for both the characters and the audience has just begun--a process that will hopefully be soon completed...