Word: leib
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Epstein and Mark Leib, who translated the play, have gone back over every line and scene of the original text, delicately excising those barbs that are simply too topical to appreciate two centuries later but leaving intact the many strands of Beaumarchais' plot. Figaro moves through its intrigues and mistaken identities in a vast double action to teach both the sluggish-witted Count Almaviva and his valet Figaro the uselessness of scheming the pointlessness of jealousy. When Mozart unleashed his inventive genius on the play, these were the themes he focused on, and his opera manipulates musical and dramatic structures...
...some students at its announcement as a threat to undergraduate access to the Loeb Drama Center, the arrival of Brustein and his professional troupe seemed to cause no immediate friction with students. The four ART shows--A Midsummer Night's Dream, Terry by Terry(a new play be Mark Leib), Happy End, and The Inspector General (directed by Peter Sellars '80)--fared well both at the box office and with critics...
...playwright Terry is Leib's modern man, a Hamletized intellectual crippled not so much by the burden of the past as by his own lack of conviction and values, unable, in the face of the failure of language and thought, even to speak, much less create a play; powerless, without a belief in absolutes, to believe in the absolute of his art; left, when the only true meaning is in silence, only to groan. Leib has, in a way, belied his vision by actually writing an eminently successful modern play (this should be called Terry by Terry by Terry...
...only blot on the premiere is Kenneth Ryan, who lacks a sense of comic timing as Wheeler, stepping on some of Leib's best laugh lines. Which is a shame, because Terry is a very funny play, and depends on its humor to reach those for whom absurdism is not an assumption. (I am thinking particularly of the middle-aged audience that grew up with, not after Camus...
...play that consistently demands attention could ever be too long; as if some of the most fundamental questions for art in our times, even if they are more immediate to undergraduates, could ever be monopolized by them. It's that kind of obtuse criticism that can keep a Mark Leib from ever earning a living in America, that kind of blockish stupidity that makes Broadway an artistic Petra. Terry was an extraordinarily risky play for the Rep to choose, an unknown work by an unknown playwright which, as they probably knew, merited the risk. A play like Terry by Terry...