Word: machina
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Designed for the National Arts Center of Canada in 1982, the production stars Mezzo Marilyn Home in one of her patented sword-and-breastplate roles. It is scenically spectacular, full of the kind of deus ex machina theatricality that so delighted baroque audiences: dragon-drawn chariots fly through the air belching smoke, monsters writhe, and looming castles collapse in a heap of rubble. Bright and vivid, Rinaldo is a bauble for the eye; as sung by an imposing cast that includes Bass Samuel Ramey and Soprano Benita Valente, it is a treat for the ear. But whether it serves Handel...
...been the Kremlin's reactions. There were inevitable postgame quibbles. Chayes is skeptical about the size of the Soviet invasion. Richard Pipes, who resigned from the real NSC staff a year ago and played a senior adviser, thinks the game's denouement "was a little deus ex machina. The Russians backed down very fast...
...without massive financial assistance from Boston's Westminster Gallery, a Newbury Street venture whose British owners feel the lack of a thriving theatre culture more acutely than Americans do. It's very sad when an enterprise claiming devotion to new American plays must depend on a British deus ex machina instead of its own government, and even sadder when the dream might better have been left unrealized...
...play is occasionally shrill and familiar; and the ending, in which the protagonist cries "Give me a chance to find some intrinsic value" and is whisked away by a deux ex machina, lacks the delicacy of the play's best moments. But at least it points to a kind of theatre beyond the blank, muddy "reality" that the rest of these plays have a foot in. Mark Milliken has staged Fits and Starts with merry rambunctiousness, and the piece is fetchingly danced by Julia Newton, an utterly charming waif. Annette Miller and John Adair, though, as mother and dog respectively...
...scene in the closing moments, when one of the actors looks critically at the others' nostalgia for the ideals of the sixties, sums up the problem. Asking what it all really accomplished, he is neatly shunted aside by a quick and easy deus ex machina, the question never to be dealt with at all. The lone figure from the past--aged 21 in 1968, 41 in 1988 when the play is supposed to take place--serves only to frame the action and act as a convenient medium for the songs, like "Hair" and "Aquarius," that can't be neatly crammed...