Word: humanity
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...entitled Crying Machine, Baskin by a recumbent sculpture suggestive of a fire victim, and Kearns by a powerful drawing of children watching an auto accident. The Kearns has Spanish intensity, plus the dark, gritty air of a Pennsylvania mining town. All three artists, Rodman says, "project anguish over the human predicament...
...military service, voting, movies and TV, mixed gatherings of men and women. They live in self-imposed ghettos, speak only Yiddish since they consider Hebrew sacred and reserved for prayers. Their opposition to Israel rests on two beliefs: 1) only the Messiah can establish a Jewish state, and any human attempt is sacrilegious: 2) the Israeli government is offensive to God for such practices as putting women in military service, secular education...
...presents a parade of stars-from a plumper Peter Lorre as a white-face clown to Mrs. Bing Crosby on a flying trapeze-and backs them up with everything from lion tamers and wire walkers to the Ronnie Lewis Trio, the Flying Alexanders, and Hugo Zacchini. the Human Cannon Ball. But as Ringmaster Vincent Price calls off act after act, The Big Circus often looks like a gaudily colored CinemaScope production of the Ed Sullivan Show...
...three are perfectly fused. It observes the classic unities of time and place and occurs against a magnificent backdrop of mountains (which the set of the current production has denied us). The theme must owe something to Betti's lifelong career as a magistrate: it tells of the final human hunger to make sense of things--political catastrophies, the death of those we love--by restoring the concepts of guilt and innocence, punishment and choice, in all their dreadful nobility. Only by forcing the wedge of moral responsibility into our lives and consenting to suffer its risks and pains...
...purely visceral crisis after another. Where we should have Trotsky in exile, we get something like Governor Long. Indeed, the major flaw of this production throughout was a submerging of the intellectual tensions in an unrelieved broiling bathos of emotionality. Betti's classic balance of philosophic dialogue and human drama was tipped over by an exclusive concentration on the latter. Lines were used as a histrionic medium in which the actors could palpitate rather than ever being allowed simply to mean, to communicate, to convey their propositional sense: it is the theatre's immemorial sin against the writer...