Word: nervous
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Disk Jockey Richard Hayes is a personable and vocally authoritative Brad, but the show suffers from a split personality. In Act I, it hunts with the hipsters; in Act II, it dines by candlelight with the squares. By musical's end, the satiric fumes have evaporated, and The Nervous Set has merely settled down...
...Nervous Set (book by Jay Landesman and Theodore J. Flicker; music by Tommy Wolf; lyrics by Fran Landesman) is a wry and indulgent spoof of the Beat Generation. The mood is mock-nihilistic. Instead of Waiting for Lefty, the hipsters of the '50s are waiting for Junkie (the dope peddler); in place of the prewar pacifism of Bury the Dead, the postwar passive-ists Dig the Bird (the late Saxophonist Charlie Parker). And, of course, boy meets girl...
Merritt Parkway pictures the intersections in a way to give a highway com missioner a nervous breakdown, but the sense of speed, flashing chrome and areas of green peripherally seen, are all there. Palisade, with its sudden dropoff into a blue void, recalls De Kooning's own sense of vertigo when he looked down from cliffside Palisades Park to the Hudson below...
...Father Tom, not yet 50, was wearing down fast, suffering nervous breakdowns, getting entangled in exhausting quarrels with his superiors about minutiae. In 1911 he collapsed, was put into one sanitarium after another, was treated as insane. "Repeated confessions but no peace," he wrote in 1913. "No hope whatever of eternal salvation. Still my vows press on me and I will continue to obey blindly...
Under Duane Murner, who serves as both director and producer for the two plays--and serves very ably, too--an unevenly talented cast gives an energetic and convincing performance. Tom Griffin, in the role of the stranger, appears somewhat nervous; maybe he's supposed to be--I guess we all would, in that kind of company. Jim Swan, one of the College's most assured actors, leads the denizen crew with a misguided righteousness that very nicely constructs the mood for the rest. They are: Robert Schwartz, Richard Dozier, George de Menil, Travis Linn and Richard Fisher--with a special...