Word: non-playing
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Tommy Kramer, the playwright, has a good grasp of some of the weaknesses in the show. "It's a difficult play that's almost a non-play--episodes, a series of skits," Kramer says. Kramer is disappointed with the opening scene and rightly criticizes it: "It's eight stand-up comics at the beginning, and the dialogue could have been a lot snappier." In the opening scene, the jokes die; the players appear lifeless, like actors reading cue cards. But the dialogue quickly snaps up, the performers relax with their roles, and work with each other until the humor comes...
...this non-play, Gore Vidal rather hysterically strafes some of his pet skunks. In order of defamation, their names are Richard Nixon, John Kennedy, Dwight Eisenhower, Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson and William F. Buckley Jr. Nixon is submitted to a kind of kangaroo court-martial, but Vidal is not interested in a dialogue of viewpoints. Instead, he offers a nonstop diatribe, vitriolic and at times caustically amusing. Nixon is so one-sided that it has the curious effect of creating a certain sympathy for its leading character...
...more in the pit, two choruses, assorted soloists, the best in lights, costumes, alarums and excursions that money could buy. The result, in some ways, was both too much and not enough. Mass is a jumble of literal and symbolic meanings, a contrived happening with pretentious overtones, a non-play about a non-Mass. In fact, what Bernstein created, perhaps unwittingly, is an upside down atomic-age Everyman in which the medieval morality play's message (man the hopeless, fleshly sinner, whose soul may yet be redeemed by Christ's Passion) degenerates into a kind of soupy, sentimental...
Masochistic guilt collectors will doubtless form a part of any audience that this play may find, as well as unavowed sadists. To arouse the conscience of man is admirable but in this non-play Weiss mainly succeeds in raising the gorge...
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