Word: playfully
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...most recent work by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Sam Shepard, is something familiar to Kellerman. His production last year of David Mamet's American Buffalo in the Loeb Ex explored the same realm of underworld deceit and betrayal, the same search for loyalty and friendship that marks this play. That is not to say Simpatico is a large scale retreading of the same dramatic ground Kellerman mapped so clearly last year. Sam Shepard is not David Mamet. He isn't able to maintain the same level of unshaking intensity that Mamet can create in his plays. Running at nearly three...
...None of this would be possible, of course, without the remarkable cast of Simpatico. Shepard's play presents the aftermath of a 15-year-old case of blackmail, showing how both the blackmailers and the blackmailed must struggle to shape for themselves normal, fulfilling lives. At the center of the play is Carter, the mastermind of the nefarious scheme, played with passion and subtlety by David Modigliani '02. Carter is the only character to have profited from the blackmail scandal, but Modigliani is wise enough to show that his success and power are as much mental creations as they...
...there are many electric moments in the play. Set designer John Gordan '01 places Shepard's characters in what resembles a series of stacked prison cells, and it is in this segmented, sequestered reality--under the blinding, white lights of Matt Denman '00--that they must fight to find companionship and solace. The difficulty of coming together in such antiseptic enclosures makes the play's moments of human contact, or near contact, all the more heart-stopping. And it makes the play's final image, an image of ultimate loneliness, seem all the more sad for its inevitability...
...worst of all, Nick Nolte looks like he has a facial tick that spreads like a plague throughout his body, resulting in a haltingly jumpy and downright silly performance. And what of Albert Finney, the well-respected actor who appeared in films like Annie and Washington Square, who arguably plays the most sane (relatively speaking) character in the film? His decision to play the part like a half-crazed babbling beggar adds to the cumulative mediocrity established by his fellow actors...
Work Hard, Play Hard...