Word: humanity
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Fowler considers himself a Christian, and he doesn't feel his faith is affronted by the questioning, human Jesus of the show (two other students chose not to be involved in the production for religious reasons). "As a believer I can believe what I want onstage, but as an actor I have a goal and obligation--and desire--to portray him as a character [just as I would any other character]...as a man who has this amazing secret that he wants to tell everybody. It's good news, but it's like Cassandra the prophet [whose predictions of defeat...
...film gives its human characters only cursory recognition. They are thinly veiled stereotypes giving stereotyped reactions in scenes that have been written a thousand times before, in a thousand better ways. The bats produce only laughter rather than gasps of fear as they crawl gargoyle-like across the screen. Casper and Kimsey are flat and undeveloped. In fact, the sole target audience that will not be disappointed by Bats would appear to be the masochists. Although quite honestly, the same affect could be achieved by banging one's head against the wall for an hour and a half...
...plot of the film is largely incidental. It appears pieced-together haphazardly, as though the script were written after the bat attack scenes were filmed, to add human faces a the cast of winged mammals. Although compared to the wooden performances of Lou Diamond Phillips and Dina Meyer, the bats are surprisingly human. Bats is so painfully unaware of its own ridiculousness that it qualifies for a place in the annals of camp classics.Yet, there is nothing tongue-in-cheek about this film. It is marketed as a thriller, in the tradition of Hitchcock's classic The Birds. Bats totally...
...best, Shepard can pull tricks of which Mamet is incapable. His characters, unlike Mamet's tough-talkers, are willing to show their own vulnerability. They are desperate to do so in some cases. And this is where Kellerman's production shines. Kellerman has an eye for portraying human frailty, for capturing the looks and muffled breaths that mark us at our weakest moments. What is most amazing is that he can make these looks and breaths seem as powerful in the 500 seat mainstage theater as they did in the infinitely smaller Ex. In an auditorium that was large enough...
...what resembles a series of stacked prison cells, and it is in this segmented, sequestered reality--under the blinding, white lights of Matt Denman '00--that they must fight to find companionship and solace. The difficulty of coming together in such antiseptic enclosures makes the play's moments of human contact, or near contact, all the more heart-stopping. And it makes the play's final image, an image of ultimate loneliness, seem all the more sad for its inevitability. It is an image that is not easy to forget. And for the first time in the play, the blinding...