Word: huck
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...have experimented with short, often merely schematic, stories. Broadway's current, warmly received Story Theatre opened with a collection of Grimms' Fairy Tales and is shortly to add a sampling of Ovid's Metamorpheses. A selection of Revolutionary War tales is in preparation. While at the Loeb, Laurence Bergreen, Huck Finn's director, himself staged a handful of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales last semester...
Bergreen has reorganized-and necessarily simplified-Twain in order that Huck's gradual recognition of the nigger Jim's humanity and, more than that, friendship provide a thematic structure. In counterpoint are arranged those episodes ashore in which Huck discovers the prevailing inhumanity of most other pre-Civil War, Mississippi Valley traditions. Perhaps because for many in the audience, suspense is precluded by knowledge of the book, while, for the rest, the bare precis that remains appears emotionally shallow, Huck's journey down the Mississippi lacks even the rudimentary sense of adventure that Tom Sawyer would demand of such...
...UNFORTUNATE that the text keeps getting in the way, for there are moments of a quite subtle beauty in this production. Huck's and Jim's self-imposed exile is seen as characteristic of a frontier society in which isolation appears to be the rule. Sara Brownell's lighting and Bob McCoy's piano accompaniment (while the latter seems too often intrusive in the rowdier episodes) are suggestive of the lonely, moral equilibrium that Huck can find only on a raft in mid-river. Fletcher World's Jim, although characterized with an understated dignity and authority that Twain himself hardly...
...true comedians in the hardworking company (the actress who plays the hair-lipped Wilkes girl, in particular), but there also is too much undisciplined scuffling and shuffling about even to allow matters to proceed as smoothly as the dream-journey that some critics have suggested Huck's river voyage is. Scott R. Heath adopted notably individualized accents for his bit characters, but not when playing the Duke. Both he and David Keyser, as the Dauphin, were just too relentlessly histrionic and, for all the effort, produced no real characterizations...
...Carden, as Huck, had to carry virtually the entire first act himself and the weight of that assignment showed. He has some fine turns, like his mimed escape from Pap's cabin, and he possesses a crazy abandon when it comes to attempting just about any kind of physical stunt. But. in an effort to pace himself for the long haul to the intermission, Carden's voice settled for the unexciting middle road. One just doesn't expect to discover such a subdued Huck Finn...