Word: leopold
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...living room setting. Surrounding the living room with a set of five doors, each leading to some degree of unknown or off-stage humour, the set designer (David Gammons) draws on the powerful effects of the drama's rhetorical structure to approximate the closed-in, yet exposed psyche of Leopold...
...director manages to retain much of Havel's opening, substituting effective lighting design for Havel's curtain (in the script, the opening has two false starts, each cut off by an abrupt curtain), and the dramatic opening acquaints us intimately with the chilling instability of Professor Leopold (Ian Lithgow...
...Leopold has been psychologically destroyed by his work, like the man in Havel's essay, "An Anatomy of Reticence," who experiences "the first moment of deterioration...when [his] artefact, [his] project for a better world, begins to expropriate his responsibility and identify, when the abstraction ceases to belong to him and he instead begins to belong...
...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...