Word: leafed
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...extensive travels. His first trip to Samoa and the South Seas was in 1916 and he kept exploring - visiting French Polynesia, Japan, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Peking, Singapore and what was then Malaya - with absolute fascination until the early 1920s. His finest short-story collections, The Trembling of a Leaf (1921), The Casuarina Tree (1926) and Ah King (1933), were inspired by these wanderings. They were all undertaken in the company of the colorful Gerald Haxton, the man who was his lover, secretary and companion for 30 years. His other significant homosexual relationship, with Alan Searle, a working-class...
...most recent Harvard production, directed by James M. Leaf ’10, never quite manages to yoke the bloody, staggering energy of the text, it mostly doesn’t matter; the resulting performance still fulfills the creepy, shaking nature of Weiss’ script. “Marat/Sade” is an apt and skilled production of a difficult and exciting play. It is unfortunate, though, that it sometimes overwhelms itself with the promise of its own potential...
...watch both the play itself and the intellectuals’ reaction to it. This idea of surveillance and reaction comes from the text—Weiss was influenced by the theories of Bertolt Brecht, a German playwright who believed in politicizing theater by highlighting its artificiality—and Leaf uses it fully...
...times, these moments are more silly than shocking, but when they work, Leaf causes the distress the play wants. Toward the middle of the play, Corday whips Sade under his own request. No real leather is used (Jakim sets her hair to the task), but Jampol’s grimaces and cries express such a mix of pain and pleasure that it is hard to believe that no one is getting hurt. Standing, arms and legs outstretched in the middle of the prison, she is at once physically bound and liberated in her speech...
Unfortunately, some more subtle aspects of the script never fully rise to the surface. Marat and Sade’s long debate about the nature of mankind comes across as exactly that—a debate more arcane than compelling. Leaf has said that he wished to compare the two title characters rather than contrast them, as is normally done, but in doing so, he fails to exploit the text’s inherent strength. Marat and Sade are so physically different—one spends most of the play horizontal and infirm while the other fully commands the stage?...