Word: huxley
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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While the play has flickers of wit and moments of poignance, it is less a drama than an exercise in computer programming. Albee has fed into it only such data as will produce the answer that this is the worst of all possible worlds. And just as Aldous Huxley spoke of "murderee" types, Malcolm is a corruptee-he invites corruption. He is dumb, passive and available, and he lacks all strength of purity. The healthy organism rejects disease; the pure spirit resists evil. As for the spectacle of the supine young Adonis having his flesh and heart beaked...
...from a basically land-oriented state of mind, which he can persuasively argue was vestigial feudalism, to a totally disoriented materialism. He celebrates "age segregation," the war and post-war generations' cult of self which, even if it sounds a trifle too much like the emancipation proclamations of Aldous Huxley et al. some 40 years ago is still a real and well observed phenomenon...
Resisting the temptation to use archaic dialogue, Whiting keeps his dialogue modern and even Soc Relish. Detailed arguments in the book often reappear contained in conversational sentences. For example, Huxley insists that men searching for evil do so from a sense of their own sinfulness. When the Archbishop in the play puts a temporary halt to Grandier's witch-trial and the chief exorcist complains that "the Archbishop has made evil impossible in this place," Whiting uncannily reveals the prosecutor's unconscious guilt...
...Aldous Huxley meant his study of an historical incident to be both an abstraction of the witch-trial mentality and a critique of the McCarthy hearings. Whiting thankfully preserves the abstract quality even when tempted by the theatrical. On the night before his death, Huxley's Grandier instantly calms his fear when his older colleague assures him that "God is here." The playwright, however, foregoes the sudden conversion and instead has Grandier change slowly through the last...
...sane and balanced Grandier, but Anne Bancroft still overplays it. Her Prioress believes too completely in her demoniac possesion, so we miss that nether-land between consciousness and unconsciousness in which the real Soeur Jeanne acted. Miss Bancroft also plays the unpossessed sequences with an overflowing wholesomeness, while Huxley discloses her character as both bitter and shallow...