Word: leveretts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...real problem with the Leverett production is at the same time one of its great strengths: Smith chooses to omit the entire comic subplot of the play written by collaborator William Rowley (without which the title is nearly meaningless). This leaves the play almost unbelievably short--the whole thing takes an hour-and-a-half, including a 15-minute intermission and scene changes. Along with the director's rapid-fire pacing of the scenes, this insures that The Changeling won't give audiences an overdose of post-Shakespearean blank verse--which most of the actors cope well with anyway...
Bereft of these comic scenes, the Leverett show was free to be a brief but potent spectacle of violent tragedy. Instead the performers seen to feel they have to make up for the comedy lost when the subplot was cut. In the process they dilute the effectiveness of the best melodramatic scenes...
...cast's defense, however, it should be noted that some of Middleton's lines would draw nothing but laughter from modern audiences, even in the hands of brilliant performers. And at some moments the Leverett House group does give us a taste of sensational horror. De Flores returns to Beatrice after the murder and presents her with the severed ring-cum-finger, still bleeding in a white handkerchief. Both Terris and Montgomery play the tableau to the hilt, he leering, she screaming. Afterwards, the tension becomes oppressive as the walks slowly, step by step across the tiny stage towards...
...from Peter Knapp as Alsemero, the nobleman Beatrice really loves. Knapp is a sleeper, underacting so much that he is almost unnoticeable for most of the play. But when he learns of his beloved's infidelity, he seems to come out of nowhere and shake the beams in the Leverett theater's ceiling with his bellow, "You are a whore...
...conditions of the Leverett Old Theater would work against the performers, even if they did not try to act more consistently in the grand manner and take Middleton seriously. The stage is miniscule--the audience within a few feet of the actors. Something less intimate and more imposing might work better: The Changeling really calls for grand-operatic treatment--big gestures, declamation and all. Instead of entering wholeheartedly into this approach, or finding some other basis for their actions, the actors root themselves motionless on the stage most of the time to deliver their lines...