Word: pena
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Alma Pena...
George de la Pena, 22. Soloist, American Ballet Theater. The slight (5 ft. 9 in., 140 lbs.) De la Pena's long suit is a powerful sense of theater. At A.B.T. he has danced such roles as the Bluebird in Sleeping Beauty, a sailor in Fancy Free and the Nutcracker prince. A high point came last year when he played the old dollmaker in Coppélia. A curtain-time substitute, he gave a dark, almost mystical performance that New York balletomanes still prize...
...PLAY IS UNCONVENTIONAL, and an unusual undertaking for the Loeb mainstage. Panizza's ideas have been undeservedly shunned by directors, but the script has technical faults which director Richard Pena failed to recognize. Sometimes the metaphor of syphilis becomes obsessive, which makes the devil's session before God too long, redundant and plain boring. As the devil himself observes, "You can take a lot of crap as long as you can communicate." His soliloquy is laced with pseudo-scientific clap-trap that is arresting only because Kenneth Demsky's tremulous head, clubfooted hitch and fine, brooding elocution fascinate...
...Richard Pena's directing reaches its height as the eight now dead characters are confronted by Satan in preparation for their final judgements. Merging into one shivering, jello-like mass, the eight actors jitter and moan together with effective apprehension...
Under Richard Pena's direction, things move quickly enough so you don't remember having heard the jokes before on TV, except for the sags of a few dropped phrases. But the humor is there, and although Adaptation doesn't satirize anything which hasn't gotten plenty before, everything that it does satirize can still...