Word: mayers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Lest we forget, these men are peculiarly American monsters. Mayer, through dialog, and director Thomas Babe through blocking, try two things simultaneously: to recreate the detail and language of the period, and to define a kind of American epic...
...Prince Erie's finest scenes, a shipboard dialog between Fisk and Gould, Gould reveals that his only interest in life is the satisfaction derived from having things, and Fisk laments quietly that he will never have a child. Though giants, both men are essentially impotent, and to Mayer--as to Welles--this is not a small part of the American myth, for their impotence is both a driving source of power and an ultimate source of failure. In a whorehouse scene just before Fisk is shot, Claudia, a whore, says to her madam, "I would rather be Mr. Fisk...
Prince Erie boasts some of the finest dialog heard on a stage in-recent years. Mayer's speeches combine formal rhythms and precise images with deliberately chosen colloquialisms and small mistakes in grammar, both creating characterization and recreating the formal journalistic idiom of the period. Reporting the market crash, the Heraldreporter ends his news story with, "Threats against Fisk are freely indulged in." Fisk's early employer Daniel Drew prays, "Deliver me from the House of the Harlot, Lord, and from the rest of this here lewd company who don't give two bits for Thy commandments...
...Mayer's inversions are often tragically funny in context; Drew again, on being excluded from the business operations: "Them boys is getting a damn sight too cute." Fisk's dialog masterfully combines bad grammar and vernacular with innumerable phrases from the Bible. "Poor suffering bastards," he yells at the crowd he has cheated, "You want your money? It has gone where the woodbine twineth...
Babe directs Mayer's 31 scene opus with intelligence and precision, drawing on several different dramatic conventions. His brilliant blocking evokes the period with character groupings resembling Thomas Nast cartoons of contemporary editorial pages, and antiquated melodramatic woodcuts. Three major scenes are mimed in front of a black-and-white American flag, and it perfectly into the even pacing of the play. The most dazzling of Babe's devices concern the scene transitions, all of which are visibly effected by uniformed stagehands, and generally overlap with the action. Climactically, we watch the stage crew change a living room...