Word: off-broadway
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Someone called, of course, and the rest is Off-Broadway history. William Alfred clearly enjoys, if somewhat uneasily, his new role, but he looks at the whole affair with the same irony and good-natured humor that mark his opinions on nearly everything else. It is easy to see why the press has taken to Alfred for h is, as his Irish ancestors would say, a "grand guy." His good taste is always tinged with a humorous saltiness that seems to deal pretension a wallop. He is a native Brooklynite who doesn't hesitate to use the work...
...lacking in John Gielgud's curiously inanimate performance. The pukka sahib accents of the cast conjure up stiff-lipped Britons muddling through, rather than Russians sucked under in emotional quicksands. Chekhov's night music of the soul, so beautifully attuned in Director William Ball's 1958 off-Broadway revival, is jangled here. At its purest, it is an ineffable resonance of laughter and tears, making the whole world kin. It is unthinkable that anyone who loves Chekhov would miss the Gielgud production, and equally unthinkable not to regret what is missing...
...evaluating countries or regions-a sort of sliding obscurity scale-without making it clear how it would be applied. The standards of obscurity are historically fickle. Czechoslovakia and Poland seemed fairly obscure to many Americans in the 1930s, but events there led to World War II. Greece was an off-Broadway tragedy after World War II until Harry Truman decided to commit U.S. power there to stop a Communist takeover. Today, obscurity may be gently, even favorably, applied to such non-countries as Andorra, such splinter countries as Sikkim. But Galbraith is breathtaking in classifying as obscure all of Southeast...
...them. "I know that God exists because of my personal experience," he says. "I know that I know him. I've talked with him and walked with him. He cares about me and acts in my everyday life." Still another is Roman Catholic Playwright William Alfred, whose off-Broadway hit, Hogan's Goat, melodramatically plots a turn-of-the-century Irish immigrant's struggle to achieve the American dream. "People who tell me there is no God," he says, "are like a six-year-old boy saying that there is no such thing as passionate love?they just haven...
...playgoers rushed to off-Broadway theaters the way children tumble downstairs on Christmas morning, breathlessly expecting the unexpected present. But too many lemons showed up in the theatrical stocking, and audiences became wearier and warier. Production costs jumped, and off-Broadway found itself increasingly prey to the worst of Broadway's ailments, the hit-or-flop syndrome. So the off-Broadway theater is in crisis-an un-fabulous invalid. Luckily, this decline has zapped most vanity productions and self-indulgent exercises in beatnicknack-ery. The remnants, plus some earnest repertory and some irreverent topical comedy, still offer venturous playgoers...