Word: mayer
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Mayer had been directing for years before he began writing seriously for the state. Anyone who has ever seen one of his rehersals knows the perfection of his control of the theater from light board to script girl; his exultation in his own unchallenged command of the mannerisms of theater people. His energy, now revealed as anger, as self-pity, as melodrama, never flags: any needle in any vein to keep the show alive. He is the supreme impresario, diverting his own eyes and the world's from himself to his creations. If he could put King Kong on stage...
...same time, and with equal passion, Mayer is a writer and lyricist with impressive gifts. It may be fair to say that his writing was at first an extension of his directing; it was an attempt to extend his hegomony over his theater, to reduce the number of autonomous elements which could stand against his authority. Had there been nothing more to it than hunger for power, he might have gone on to dispense with the actors altogether and made theater with one flashing machine under his personal control. Maybe the thought has crossed his mind. But turning inward...
Furtively and cryptically. Mayer has begun to explore his obession with illness and death. It is a measure of the terror of the obsession itself that from the perspective of good health and at the distance of art Mayer still confronts the horror obliquely--through understatement, burlesque, and nonchalance. But do not be misled by these devices into doubting the seriousness of Mayer's purpose. The wail of fear drones in the songs (some of which, like "Cat Scratch Fever," recur in his shows as anthems), in the abruptness of the pacing and in the roller-coaster whirling...
...closest to being at ease with his part. His job is subdued, as incorporeal and introspective as any Job could be. Something must be done, however, to rescue his lines from the engulfing roar of the turning platform to which he is pinioned in the second act. Even if Mayer has chosen to mute Job--as he muted Christ--and give a raucous verbosity to his tormentors, there is no excuse for throwing away what lines the character does have. The female lead, Susan Channing, as the Devil, superb actress she is, was so wonderfully bratty, saucy and puckish that...
...foolish to catalogue the crdits and debits of the opening night of a production as volatile and hurriedly achieved as this one. Only two things are certain. First, than in Jesus and Job Mayer has moved towards an intimacy and self-revelation which may eventually carry him away from his cherished devices of stagecraft and the Cambridge audience which applauded its more conventional manifestations. The other is that Mayer's visions and his struggles with them are worth seeing. For the sake of the man, for the sake...