Word: leopold
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...bathrobe-clad Lithgow, who literally shivers with paranoia for much of the play, gives us a convincing portrayal of Leopold's alcoholic helpnessness and consuming self-alienation in face of the incessant fear of the unknown "they" who will carry him off to "there." Indeed, while the seven scenes of the drama all unfold in Leopold's living room, and he is the focal point of nearly all the dialogue, Lithgow for the most part persuades us that he is, as his "friend" Bertram (David Gammons) says, the "passive object" of his own life...
...Lithgow presents a Leopold acquiescent to self-destruction, Rouse demands a more complex interpretation, reading Havel's play as a study in tragic hilarity. Rouse goes a fair distance to portray the outside world from which Leopold is excluded, transforming Lucy (Jessica Walling), Leopold's unrequited mistress, into a lascivious lover who must compete with the male "friend" Bertram, for the professor's attention, and juxtaposing the confused living room existence of the actual drama with cascades off-stage laughter between Leopold's friends, Suzana (Jessica Fortunato) and Edward (Thomas Parks...
Harassed by Bertram, his other "fans" Sidney and Sidney (Mark Fish and Michael Stone) from the paper mill, his enemies, the two Chaps (also Fish and Stone) representing the baneful "they" and his assertive mistress, Lucy, Lithgow's Leopold is an oppressed identity whose self-imprisonment in his living room reflects a more malignant psychological incarceration in a meaningless system of language and behavior...
Gammons succeeds in becoming the drama's arch-oppressor as the pathologically smug Bertram; in a driving performance, he assaults Leopold verbally and ultimately physically, appending a quasi-sexual violence to the string of cliches he spits out. Gammons flaunts his matter-of-fact power over Leopold, crescendoing to an explosive frenzy with his own discourse; at the time Walling enters, Bertram is literally straddling Leopold, who Rouse has virtually transformed into the "passive object" of sexual, as well as intellectual interest. What Gammons' words and behavior add to the hollowed grammar of Leopard's existence, Fish and Stone...
...When Leopold alternates his paranoic pacing back and forth with trips to the medicine cabinet, we are unsure whether he runs to the bathroom to get the drugs out of his system or vomit quantities of banal expressions. The dramatic risk is that, trampled under the recylced rhetoric of the world around him, Lithgow loses the innermost psychological tension of the play. Havel's subtle development (or un-development) of Leopold's character evades Lithgow, who remains confined by the circularity of the plays gestures and language...