Word: peppel
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...concerned with decadence and lost time. It takes place entirely in an inn for drifters. The 17 characters range from a baron (M. Daniel Hughes '01) down to a girl of the streets (Jessica B. Kirschner '01). All of them have unique difficulties so that no single one predominates. Peppel (Jared M. Greene '03), the coolly effective driving force of the play, drops out entirely after the third act. None talk about where they come from or where they are going; any attempts to reconstruct a past are shouted down as lies. These people simply exist...
...characters divide down the middle between men and women. The men, mostly former convicts, expect the women to uphold a higher standard of morality, to "have souls." Too often, however, the women fail in the moment of trial. Vassilissa (Kimberly J. Ravener '03), Peppel's landlady and sometime mistress, is as pure an expression of bitchiness as recent memory offers. The one potential for action in the play comes when she tries to persuade Peppel to kill her husband. Nothing comes of it. That ambition is as abortive as any other. Adding to the cycle of destitution, Vassilissa and Peppel...
...With Luka and Peppel out of the picture, the fourth act suffers from lack of direction. This was partly Gorky's intention. Satin (Nick Meunier '02) picks up the slack by translating some of Luka's wisdom into a sardonic wit more accessible to many of the drifters. The cast, however, has a bit too much fun joyriding, which takes away from the impact of the pointed suicide...
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