Word: miscreants
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Opening-night rough spots, largely owing to lack of rehearsal time and uncertain acoustics in the new house, hurt the performances. But Actor Robards, with his long, brooding spade-jawed scowl, was almost always convincing as the man of honor changing slowly into an unwilling miscreant and finally into a ruthless, sneering, hell-bent King. Outstanding moments: his bloody babbling after Macbeth murders Duncan ("Macbeth does murder sleep"), the "Tomorrow and tomorrow" speech as he holds his dead wife in his arms. Actress McKenna made her Lady Macbeth warm and feminine ("I feel people should have compassion for the sinners...
...line. By bringing to Pennsylvania a sophisticated young New Yorker (with a farm to sell) and his acidly vivacious girl friend, Plain and Fancy achieves some entertaining contrasts between plain and fancy living, country and city ways. When the Amish aren't donning their buttonless clothes, "shunning" a miscreant or putting up a barn, the city gal is being ogled by six frighteningly silent Amish youths, or is trying to pump water, churn butter, cook rice and grind sausage all at once-which makes the gayest five minutes in the show...
...invective washed over teetotaling Congressman Edwin Arthur Hall, he let fly again: "One of the most cowardly attacks in history . . . Perhaps ... [I] hit some guilty consciences and they yelled to high heaven. I was crucified on the House floor . . ." But the House, apparently confident that it had settled the miscreant's hash with one massive swat, did not seem to hear...
Sometimes Utsugi found it necessary to introduce the sordid business of jail. At one flower-viewing he nabbed a thief who had filched a pair of ladies' bloomers, and hauled the miscreant off to headquarters. All in all, he captured close to 3,000 Nip dips, including the acknowledged master of them all, Ito Tamotsu. These incidents were usually conducted in a spirit of professional courtesy. "Ah, Tamotsu," said Utsugi when he copped the notorious Ito with his hand in an alien pocket for perhaps the 19th time, "I have caught you once again." "So you have," acknowledged Tamotsu...
...over the corpse of Cordelia was pure pathos. In portraying the fall of Lear from king to disillusioned father, to madman, to dying, bereaved old man, Devlin combines the grandeur of the king and the weakness of the old man. He binds the magnificent curse of his miscreant daughter Generil ("Into her womb convey sterility"), and the moving vision of life in prison with Cordelia ("So we'll live and pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh at gilded butterflies") into a believable picture of King Lear. He does full justice to a superhuman part...