Word: playe
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Survivors" flopped in New York on its initial run, despite the praise of drama critics Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times and the New Yorker's Woolcott Gibbs. HDC hopes, however, that their version of the play will re-arouse public interest in it, since Lee Strasberg, who directed "Men in White" and "Skipper Next to God" on Broadway has dressed the work up especially for them. Gibbs will attend one of the performances and review the HDC production...
...almost everybody production. Shaw and Viertel, who wrote "The Survivors," far from meaning harm, appear to have attempted to creste an allegory for our times, a dramatization of the concept that unreasonable hatred and stupidity make nations, as well as men, wipe each other out of existence. But the play itself adds up to little more than a somewhat melodramatic series of bare repetitions of this concept which, admirable as it may be in itself, requires something more than persistent enunciation to become entertainment. Similarly the Dramatic Club, far from meaning harm, has attempted to resurrect what it believed, along...
...intellectual level the play is sound enough. The though that murder and war are the equally unnecessary products of ignorance and dullness, while perhaps not universally satisfactory, is at least acceptable enough to be called sound. But on the dramatic level, "The Survivors" reveals little that could be classed as sound theater, much less as entertaining or inspiring theater. The play takes place in a small Missouri town immediately after the Civil War. It concerns the perverse hatred of three brothers and their grandfather for a local rancher, who apparently contrived to have two of the brothers captured...
...Dramatic Club's production is competent, considering the circumstances. The actors, almost to a man, indulge in speechifying, varying from tense dramatic whispers to semi-hysterical out-bursts. But such melodramatics seem to be inherent in the play. Similarly, co-directors Roy Erickson and Burt Kelsey have far too often permitted the actors to stand in awkward groups in the canter of the stage. If more imagination had been exerted, more realistic and fluid action could undoubtedly have been devised, but again the basic difficulty seems to lie in the play itself, which handicaps the director by substituting pseudo-eloquence...
...most of the others are talented was evident last night at scattered intervals. The Dramatic Club should take more care not to submerge such abilities, as well as those of John Holabird and Emory Niles, who respectively accomplished the reasonably attractive sets and lighting, under such an unfortunately, chosen play as "The Survivors...