Word: hummell
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...structure of misplaced judgment which leads to a terrible lack of compassion creates all of the catastrophes of the play. Hummel, the avenger, has let his self-righteousness blur his own intrinsic faults. The Mummy's self-conscious expression of her own guilt and her forty years of repentance does not prevent her from turning on Hummel with a vituperation equal in degree to the Old Man's. Even the student (whom Mr. Gordon took, as far as the text is concerned and not the production, to be helpless in the face of some great farce moving without...
...that these are in any way pale ghosts; the H.D.C. production well brings out how fine, tense, and enormously vital they are. The old Jacob Hummel, who must comprehend and dominate an ornate, almost Florentine, tangle of intrigue in the first and second acts, cows everyone in the Loeb with his knowledge of sin. "I've caused misery and been miserable myself," he says, "They must cancel each other...
Bribing, threatening, tremendously assured, he stands as a universal bloodsucker; there is no forgiveness in him. Richard Simons, (who is a psychiatrist and I'm told something of a professional actor) plays Hummel superbly; a folksy gaffer at the start, his rises from his wheelchair to become an avenging angel who punishes men mercilessly for being human...
Beside these two first-rate actors, the rest of Director Thom Babe's cast looks ineffectual. This is not true of the servants, Jere Whiting and Stanford Janger: Whiting is if anything too overwhelmingly ghoulish and Janger too cheerfully unaffected by his own enslavement to Hummel. But they are more than competent. The dreadful ineffectuality of this production comes in the third act, after the clashes and climaxes of the play...
This almost impossibly difficult act ostensibly shows how bloodsucking forces work; a young student who has witnessed Hummel's stripping of people's illusory virtues watches the innocence of the girl he loves drained. The symbolic drainer is a frightening cook (Karolina Nystrom) who turns gravy into colored water and poisons the love-hyacinths of the young couple. But the couple is pretty anemic anyway; Maria Livanos turns delighted innocence into unappealing skittishness, and Frederick Kirchhoff pouts and jumps unreasonably about the stage, making an intelligent idealist learning the fundamentals of Strindbergism seem a mawkish yalie...