Word: laughter
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...School takes itself too seriously, and the haggard, bleary-eyed faces around me looked like they'd been saving up laughter about themselves for a long, long time. And for that audience, the evening was blissful. Small-scale Harvard drama always has a safety mechanism: If your lack of professionalism starts to show, just laugh it up, enjoy yourself on stage, and the audience--if it has any reason to feel involved--will forget they're watching a bunch of clods and chuckle along magnanimously. It's critical immunity...
...though, don't have academics on the brain so much, or find it easy to get into the "good ol' Harvard law" stuff for too long. When six actors mince onto the stage in togas and garlands (underwear, basically) hooting "We are the faculty of Harvard law," the laughter isn't so automatic to us. And because we can't excuse the lack of smoothness as lightly as the law students, the scene spoofing the Watergate committee is funny only in bursts, as when a spacey Montoya ("Professor Howaya") addresses the witness chair between snoozes to ask the dog seated...
THOMAS FULLER as Rackstraw and Lise Landis as Josephine play their caricature parts with a sincerity that heightens the effect of the great cliche. Their dripping love scenes draw roars of laughter from the audience. Josephine's asides like, "His simple eloquence goes to my heart!" and "Oh, my heart, my beating heart!" and Rackstraw's statement of love, with the phrase "wafted one moment into blazing day, by mocking hope--plunged the next into Cimmerian darkness of tangible despair, I am but a living ganglion of irreconcilable antagonisms." draw cheers from an unbelieving audience...
...absurdities that defies rational criticism. This is an extremely witty show in all aspects of production, and though the material comes from all directions, it represents an agile synthesis on LaZebnik's part. As author-composer-director he has produced a consistently funny and entertaining evening that elicits laughter and a sense of amazement...
What does a very funny writer do whose laughter is always choking into a retch? Among other stratagems, Wilson has tried to revive the well-made Victorian novel (see The Middle Age of Mrs. Eliot). He has sketched portraits of the very old and the very young (Late Call...