Word: papp
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Written as a novel in 1946, Beckett's Mercier and Camier is stillborn in its transition to drama at Joseph Papp's Green wich Village Public Theater. One can understand what impelled Adapter Neumann's strenuous and occasionally imaginative effort, since the book was, essentially, Waiting for Godot in its earliest and distinctly embryonic state. The two title characters (Frederick Neumann and Bill Raymond) are as close as barstool buddies, and they stumble and blather about in a bleak inscape of metaphysical despair. Despite intermittent japery, they are triste, petulant atheists who resent the fact that they...
...show, are good at zany little bits of dialogue. In one skit, Jesus Christ shows up for an audition. "You don't look like your picture, Christ," remarks the casting director. "I shaved for a commercial," answers the beardless deity. There is a delicious lampoon of Joseph Papp's Public Theater. A character walks onstage carrying a case labeled P.T. PLAYWRIGHTING KIT. Its contents include "bogus charisma" and a promise to "turn your meaningless tripe into a crock...
...takes an actor of liquid fire and the keenest intelligence to carry all of that off, and Morgan Freeman accomplishes it in this rousing production of the play at Joseph Papp's off-Broadway Public Theater. It also requires one other thing, a figure of equal mettle in the tigress role of Coriolanus' mother, Volumnia...
With the audacity of the venturesome, Joseph Papp has assembled a black-Hispanic acting troupe, and its debut production is Julius Caesar. In the U.S. the problem of proper delivery of the Shakespearean line transcends ethnic background or race. Few, if any, American actors are qualified to speak in iambic pentameter. Lacking sufficient breath control, they pant when they should roar, and jangle the music and authority of poetic rhetoric...
...contrast, at Voznesensky's reading last month in Joseph Papp's Public Theater in New York City, the poet created an atmosphere of almost monastic serenity. A large, white, Russian Orthodox church candle burning on the podium provided virtually the only lighting. "It is more intimate for you, my friends," Voznesensky explained to an audience that included Mstislav Rostropovich, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and C.P. Snow. As Poet William Jay Smith, a favored translator and friend, read English versions from Nostalgia for the Present, Voznesensky could be glimpsed in the wings, his slight figure rigid with apprehension...