Word: linn
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Into this festering, still pool of corruption drops the inert stone of Khlestakov, the young visitor, sending violent waves through everyone else's life but remaining happily, passively at rest himself. Mark Linn-Baker seems deliberately to make no more and no less of this character than Gogol did--which is to say, nothing, a personality-less cipher whose every action either fulfills the most hollow expectations of societal conduct or moves inertially towards a well-fed rest. Unable to choose, he mechanically makes love to both the mayor's wife and daughter--two primped peacocks immobile on a divan...
Terry Won't Talk springs from the refusal of Terry Blade (Mark Linn-Baker) to communicate with his family; as sister Suzy (Marilyn Caskey) announces at the outset, "Momma! Terry won't talk!" Terry becomes a sort of walking Rorschach blot, upon whom each of the characters projects an explanation for his silence: his mother (Elizabeth Norment) thinks someone lied to him; his teacher (Nancy Mayans) thinks he's ill; the principal (John Bottoms) sees it as the silence of a poet; and Mrs. Blade's lover, Chester, who seems to be a regular reader of Existential Digest, ascribes...
...sense that a man who's been shipwrecked on a desert island for two hundred years might find a telephone new and fascinating." It includes the disutility of language: language is only dinner-table "chatter," and all attempts to get Terry to verbalize his meaning fail (Linn-Baker goes through the play without a word). There is the failure even of rational thought, as epitomized in the trivializing portrait of Chester. We get the dehumanizing effects of technology in an ingenious scene in which Terry's classmates, forming pistons with their fists, erase a girl's face...
...implies a production of a production--actors playing actors. Madden's effect is boosted here by the equally stylized sets, always smaller than the stage, parading their artificiality, masterfully created by Andrew Jackness. The Terry of Terry Won't Talk is more metaphsyical than physical, but master mime Mark Linn-Baker brings him to life, sometimes with a tilt of his head, sometimes with a peculiarly appropriate shuffle of a walk. Richard Grustin is just as effective as Terry's father, turning in a suitably theatrical and vivacious performance...
...half-nelson, and literally dogs his path with a graphic spaniel imitation; Eric Elice and Marianne Owen as Lysander and Hermia separate "as may well be said becomes a virtuous bachelor and a maid" before they fall asleep, roll towards each other and exchange places before waking up. Even Linn-Baker's alien Puck adds comic touches, hopping to his sing-song tetrameter or grimacing with impatience at Oberon's bombast...