Word: nagin
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Sartre's cage is the problem of life lived in the face of imminent violent death. A group of Underground fighters are caught after a bloody, but unsuccessful mission. Only their leader, Jean (Carl Nagin, also the play's translator) escapes. Later he is taken into the cage under an assumed identity, watches his comrades and lover as they go out to be tortured, and then flees. Of the others, one Sorbier (Dominic Meiman) commits suicide rather than talk, and a young boy (Edward Jay) is killed by his fellows rather than be permitted to talk. The three others...
...role of Jean is a confused one. Ostensibly the group leader, he is ostracized by the group for avoiding their fate of torture. Jean weakly begs for approval. But since Nagin never appears as a leader, his half-hearted gestures leave one guessing whether he is acting weak or weakly acting...
Peter Weil as the Drum Major and Carl Nagin as Woyzeck's friend Andres work in their parts more out of physical presence than anything else. Mayer has, on occasion, underdirected his actors: Nagin seems to be playing more to himself than to Babe, and James Shuman's monologue sounds more like an exercise in dialogue modulation than the barroom philosophy it should...
...Carl Nagin as Dionysus is brilliant within the context of the interpretation. He succeeds in breaking up lines written in the fifth century B. C. with cigarette smoke, a feat that demonstrates Babe's modernizing at its most effective...
...last-act confession of feeling has to border on the maudlin to have any effect. But his drunken recounting of the night at the whorehouse, along with Sheila Hart's portrayal of the servant girl, are the only moments of humor in the play which came across successfully. Nagin and Seltzer seem to feel reticent and slightly guilty when O'Neill gives them anything funny...