Word: marstons
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...present production has both laudable and disappointing aspects. It lacks real style; but this is extremely hard to achieve short of the Comedie Francaise. Still, director Marston Balch errs in trying to get by on farce. Although the third act has undeniable farce in it, it is a mistake to consider the whole play a farce: it is high comedy, near-farce if you like, but not true farce. I am sure the first two acts would come off better if treated in a less overdone manner...
...Marston Balch has directed a cast that has entered well enough into the spirit of the piece. The three principals have even managed to impart a third dimension to their roles: Jacquelyn Zollo as the Grandmother; Joyce White as Isabel; and Lake Bobbitt as Maurice. Though perhaps a bit young-looking for the role, Bobbitt sails through the evening with a dashing naturalness. And the whole production benefits from Thaddeus Gesek's handsome settings, including a wonderful multicolored spiked mobile for the enigmatically daft first...
...proved to be the occipital (posterior) bone of a human skull, and its position in a stratum containing crude flint hand axes and the bones of long-extinct animals made it exciting news in anthropological circles. Marston soon found a second bone (left parietal) which fitted the first bone perfectly. The two bones were enough to give some idea of an extremely ancient kind of man who lived along the Thames about 250,000 years ago, before the last of the great glaciers crept over England...
Ever since Marston's find, diggers have haunted Barnfield Pit. Most persistent haunters were the Wymers. Bertram Wymer had been digging for antiquities since he was 19. His wife adopted his hobby on their honeymoon, and son John started digging as soon as he was old enough to handle a small trowel. In Barnfield Pit they found plenty of crude flint tools, but for years neither they nor other diggers found anything very interesting. The great prizes-more bones of "the first Englishman" or clues to the life he led-did not show up in hundreds of tons...
Last July came a change of luck. Son John found a right parietal skull bone. It fitted precisely the two bones found by Marston, and proved that "the first Englishman" (probably a young woman) had an essentially modern brain. A wave of excitement brought hordes of diggers to Barnfield Pit. But still almost nothing was known about how the first Englishmen lived...