Word: leopold
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...study, Mozart: A Life (HarperCollins; 640 pages; $35), has gone much further than any of his predecessors in humanizing his subject. Above all, he limns the complex relationship between Mozart and the person who was the center and the terror of his life: his father, the fabulous monster Leopold...
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...
...Stoddard's English version nor Rouse's production lose the author's nascent sarcasm. Fraught with cliche, the play seems to make fun of the postmodern genre it places itself in; in Rouse's interpretation, the language surfaces with such hollow force that we can easily imagine that Leopold's books must read like the non sensical phrases of the artist/critic Mark Tansey's "Wheel...