Word: inhumane
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...their weight; Carmen de Lavallade's Titania flexes her body in superhuman ways and says more with it than most performers manage with the help of Shakespeare's verse; the quartet of fairies in her train--dressed in skintight body suits, adorned with tails and extended fingers--is menacingly inhuman. Their lullaby for the sleeping queen, miles distant from both Mendelssohn and Purcell, sounds exactly like a chorus of watchful insects...
...sextet of "rude mechanicals" who wander into the forest to rehearse their play intrudes on this inhuman enclave like visitors from another dimension. Their antics, delivered by the ART actors with gung-ho spirit and the precision of acrobats, form a haven of the familiar in Epstein's inhospitable forest; yet even they become possessed, reacting to Bottom's "translation" by careering across the stage in hops, sprints and tumbles while the musicians play one of Purcell's country dances. The sorcery of the wood finds little purchase on their "hempen homespun" minds, but gets at then anyway through their...
...stage at the Hasty Pudding Theatricals is a character called Ed Foo Yung. The script describes him as "one of them Chinamen...with the scrawny little mustaches." He is "slimy" and "disgusting." As he enters, Ed is hunched over, pigtailed and inhuman. He mumbles in pidgin English, and leers at the blond Mae. Too weak to defend himself, he is thrown around the stage by his pigtail and must die for proclaiming his desires for "the pretty white lady...
Worse, many of these jokes aimed at the biggest problems with the Law School: the inhuman competition, the grade-lust, the Brooks Brothers suit and the job on Wall Street after graduation. These are fit objects for satire, but not when the satirists are the villains themselves--then the humor is only a device to distance these people from their own guilt. It is offensive to hear somebody yuk it up about working for Cravath, Swaine and then go interview with them the next day. Yukking it up about corporate fascism makes it a lot easier to live with yourself...
...HUMAN form--manipulated, distorted fractured, parodied--recurs throughout the show. In Picasso's "Woman in an Armchair" a schematic body is cut into two-dimensional sections as if from plywood. A later work with the same name shares the hideous distortions of the figures in his "Guernica" mural. Inhuman cones and spirals combine in odd juxtapositions of anatomy...