Word: mastering
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...MASTER BUILDER...
...Loeb Mainstage itself and partly a function of A.R.T. sets which are too conceptual to bother setting the right time-of-day tone. This darkening affect is only a part of an A.R.T "feel" that touches almost every show they produce, and their most recent, Henrik Ibsen's The Master Builder, is no exception...
Opening on a scene set in an architectural workshop that actually looks more like an aquarium or a behavioral biology lab, The Master Builder encapsulates its actors in boxes and makes them stand on benches or platforms. By the time the master builder himself, Halvard Solness (played by Christopher McCann), comes on stage, the production has made such an obscurely penetrating impression on the audience that McCann takes the opportunity to give the unfolding plot both personality and plausability. He sits and bitches through scenes, denying the younger generation that wants to come into its own while he guiltily broods...
Robert Brustein's adaptation of Ibsen's writing skids between the deconstructive (he has the master builder claim that he builds "machines for living") and the pedestrian, furthering the productions stance as a dark fable of universal applicability. At times the story of the master builder, at a zenith of reputation and skills, seems to mirror Brustein's own career, except that Brustein "climbs the steeple" with nearly every production. The Master Builder climbs up an icy ladder; it doesn't fall...
Among those in attendance were Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis '68 and Mather House Master Sandra A. Naddaff...