Word: hypatia
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Misalliance, first produced in 1910, St. George Bernard Shaw goes forth to slay the dragon of family life with his own jawbone. The two renowned fathers in the play are exposed as shameless old rips, their sons and daughters as scamps with serpents' teeth. The emancipated heroine, Hypatia Tarleton, says, "I just don't want to be bothered about either good or bad. I want to be an active verb.'' Actually, she and the others are passive wordlings caught in a brilliant, bottomless Edwardian conversation pit. But if the people are stationary, the props are animated...
...buoyantly performed, a happy tour de farce. Donald Moffat, in the role of John Tarleton, the self-taught underwear tycoon, is the image of Shaw's young old man, the drawing-room atheist who quotes his chosen gospels: "Read Ibsen. Read Dickens. Read Whatshisname." As his daughter Hypatia, Frances Sternhagen seems to have been born with a riding crop in hand and the conviction that the pursuit of a mate is the most exciting form of fox hunt. James Greene is cringingly comic as a socialist underdog who yearns to bite the hand that feeds...
...less content with the four young people. Faye Dunaway's Hypatia Tarleton (the Young Thing) shouts and mouthes her lines magnificently--rather like the tutored Eliza Doolittle. But a shout seems to be the limit of Miss Dunaway's acting capabilities, and she is less than arch, more that dull. As her original suitor, Jere Whiting is determinedly effeminate (he can shout, too); Robert Moulthrop, her eventual choice, must be a stout fellow, but his Etonian ways do not convince. The fourth one, William Gordy, Hypatia's brother, barks gruffy; he is not a little tedious...