Word: hypatia
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Hypatia is engaged to Bentley "Bunny" Summerhays (Derek Smith), an upper-class fop who describes himself as "all brains, and no more body than is absolutely necessary." Derek Smith's humorous characterization of Bunny as a peevish, bespectacled cream-puff bears out this description. But, as Hypatia confides to her mother (Bronia Stefan Wheeler), she doesn't love him, and can't see how anyone could; she simply can't find anyone better. Besides, she adds, marrying for love is too risky. Mrs. Tarleton comments that finding a likable husband was easier for her because she grew up poor...
Filled with exasperation at the strictures of bourgeois life, and at the perpetual "talk, talk, talk" that replaces action, Hypatia envies the freedom of the poor and the wicked. Yet the audience (if not Hypatia) later learns that they are no more free than...
...Hypatia would say, it's all just more "talk, talk, talk," replacing an honest correspondence between action and the social and ideological constructs used to describe it. The lower classes remain just as hampered by false consciousness as their social superiors...
Into this stuffy little domestic British world crashes a plane containing two aviators, Bunny's old college chum Joey Percival (Royal E. Miller) and a Polish acrobat named Lina Szczepanowska (played with panache by Candy Buckley). Hypatia seizes on Joey as her deus ex machina, and pursues him with all the zeal of a liberated woman...
Especially notable are the performances of Derek Smith as Bentley, the neurotic upper-class twit, and Stephanie Roth as the energetic yet graceful Hypatia. The stage, designed as a summerhouse with a marble fountain, captures that Edwardian spirit of gracious and confining domestic life, complete with a back wall made of a metal grille. For the Tarleton family, domestic life is truly a gilded cage...