Word: mask
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...swaggering bawdiness of the Drama Club's Mandragora, the Machiavelli farce. Czech acting at its frequent best combines an animal energy with the timing of aerial acrobats. Czechs make superb comedians, and have that highest comic skill-to slip with a flash of the eye into the tragic mask. Czech direction is passionately intelligent. In Architect Josef Svoboda, they have the most imaginative stage designer working anywhere today...
...laughter. But the most resounding applause comes without a laugh when the headmaster tells his own fiancee that he hasn't the heart to be a hypocrite any longer; that "I've lost my second face." "Better find it again," she warns. "It'll serve to mask your rage...
Congealed Grin. Subtle characterization has never been the Duke's long suit. Instead, he and Hathaway create an antique through a series of gestures and symbols-a grin that congeals into a mask of hate, a plodding gait that belies the deadly hands, a primitive mind that can only understand an idea or a society by turning it over and looking at the underside. In the end they come up with a flawless portrait of a flawed man who is as simple, as forceful-and as dangerous-as Mattie's cap-and-ball Colt pistol...
...most exciting images when they deal with the human figure, a disturbing subject that has never been completely eliminated by abstract art. Even fragmented, dissolved, the figure maintains its appeal. The most striking sculpture is composed of sixteen editions of the same white face, like a plaster death mask, wedged into square compartments of a metal grid, like eggs in a box. Gliding in a sequence like words in a paragraph, the heads are tilted at slightly different angles. shifting with every position, the shadows redefine the expression on each colorless face. The head, locked in but just able...
...Kahn's most memorable scene is still to come, when Henry is handed the list of "the names of those their nobles that lie dead." As he recites the long roster, name by name, a score of men gradually come on stage each wearing a ghostly white mask splotched with fresh blood. Finally the King intones the incipit of a Te Deum, and the ghostly choir picks it up in unison and, in the manner of the Living Theatre, moves down-stage to face the audience in a long row, humming and swaying from left to right--an inspired fusion...