Word: passional
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...often pads about his office in his socks, has an easy rapport with his top staff, which CAB critics agree is one of the sharpest in Washington. An outgoing man, Kahn has brought a new sense of style and unpredictability to the once stodgy agency. He has a passion for Gilbert and Sullivan, which he often indulged at Cornell by singing and prancing in student productions. His other obsession is clear English. Says he: "If you can't explain what you're doing in simple English, you are probably doing something wrong." He admits that his fight against...
...eighteenth-century France, among the clowns, thieves, actors, pickpockets and peasants. It's impossible to do justice to this film in a mere paragraph, this story of three artists (an actor, a mime, and a murderer) who love the same woman, and must cope with their passion and jealousy in startlingly different ways. Carne's characters revel in theatrics; illusion and reality smash into each other, driving each man to the very brink of his art, to the terrifying edge of truth. Jean-louis Barrault's famous, pantomimed re-enactment of an attempted pocket-pick, his face frozen in existential...
...diplay the metaphysical hieroglyphics Camus chiseled in the walls of French intellectual thought. If, however, we take Camus at his word--and we probably should not--then the members of the experimental ensemble have failed at something worse: conveying the destructive fury to which the leading character's passion for life and the impossible leads...
Most people leave Caligula with one dominant thought: Camus is heady stuff. Director Vicente Castro, the professional drama coach for the experimental ensemble, attempts half-heartedly to make Camus's abstruse philosophy palatable to the audience, allowing his actors to gloss over nuance with passion, tenderness with violence. Unfortunately, this attempt to tone down the obscure philosophy fails to solve the problems in the play. The members of the audience leave with befuddled expressions on their faces, feeling like they've just been bludgeoned by the Poetic and Profound and that they should probably spend the rest of the evening...
CASTRO'S AMBIVALENCE about emphasizing passion or philosophy mars the entire production--the performance ends up fuzzy, focusing on neither theme. This swinging back-and-forth results in passion when a delicate appreciation of the philosophical base of the play is more appropriate, or staunch underplaying when intensity is required. In one scene, Caesonia, Caligula's mistress (Sonia Martinez), tries to explain to Scipio (Matthew Horseman), a sensitive and innocent friend of the young Roman emperor, why Caligula had his father's tongue torn from his mouth and then slain for no apparent reason. In an attempt to make Scipio...