Word: lenormand
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...current play at the Brattle, Henri Rene Lenormand's "He and She," may strike some people as a tragedy of near epic proportions, but I'm afraid I can't go along with that. To me it seemed a dreary, overwritten, and sententious bit of claptrap. The play follows a company of penniless French actors on a tour of the provinces, and illustrates at length how their sordid existence goes from bad to worse. Playwright Lenormand's worst is pretty bad; for the hero it includes malnutrition, sleeplessness, alcoholism, and frustration--capped by a bad case of laryngitis...
Jacob Ben-Ami plays the hero of this expedition into misery. He is a playwright who is supposedly a genius, but who for a great many reasons never gets anywhere. The only important reason seems to be that Lenormand is determined to make him, along with everyone else in the play, an absolute failure. Mr. Ben-Ami's performance wrings the last ounce of emotion out of the part. His acting is too often convulsive--there is no shortage of arm waving and posturing. It is only fair to record, however, that Mr. Ben-Ami got a batch of bravos...
Ruth Ford plays the actress-wife of the playwright. She starts off with a quiet, sensitive portrayal of a woman who has a fairly rational enjoyment of life. But Lenormand is out to get her, too. Miss Ford is a fine actress, and it is not her fault that the sincerity of her performance forces her to whine like a whipped cur with a post-nasal drip for long stretches toward the end of the play...
Third was L'Homme ct scs Fantòmes by H. R. Lenormand. Like his Fail- ures, which the Theatre Guild produced last year, the play was episodic. In content, it dealt with a modern Don Juan...
...first time M. Gémier comes to the U. S. and in Manhattan is producing and acting plays by Lenormand, Frondale, Berr and Verneuil, Gorsse and Forest, Moliere, Beaumarchais, Fabre, Shakespeare...