Word: playgoer
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Othello needs to be retrieved even more than it needs to be revived. Of Shakespeare's four great tragedies, which include Hamlet, King Lear and Macbeth, Othello has become increasingly less accessible to modern audiences and actors. There are several reasons for this. To the contemporary playgoer, the Moor's marital jealousy is more amazing than it is convincing, and the evidence of the telltale handkerchief seems unbelievably flimsy. Today's audiences are also more interested in lago's psychologically obscure malignity than in Othello's open nature and loftiness of soul...
Diana Rigg as Heloise and Keith Michell as Abelard are lovers not so much star-crossed as celluloid-spliced. A playgoer might even feel that he was watching an ad trailer from the film-to-be. Thrill to A & H in a nude scene played in one-watt lighting. Chill as A is symbolically castrated by some sinister leprechauns left over from a ballet of yesteryear. Hiss the uncle. Chortle with a tipsy canon (Ronald Radd) and a tipsier abbess (Jacqueline Brookes). So much for medieval color. In dialogue. Playwright Millar has spared his audience the one line that...
Smash or flop? We should guess that the play has to be tightened in the beginning and at the end before it has a reasonable run on Broadway, but do not take our word for it. This comedy provides an enjoyable evening and a chance for the playgoer to know whether or not he is in tune with the New York audiences...
Certain shows incite conditioned-reflex laughter. A quip rings a bell on stage, or a performer twitches a facial muscle, and the audience laughs, in much the same way that Pavlov's dogs salivated. The playgoer has been given nothing in the way of genuine comic nourishment. He has merely been cajoled into an empty-bellied laugh...
...Dysart) by a man who stands in the shadows and is known as The Questioner (Alvin Epstein). In the second act he interrogates Claire Lannes (Mildred Dunnock). The husband is a dull, evasive clod of a businessman, and the first act is enough of an ordeal to put a playgoer's patience in doubt. The second act redeems all. As certain healers are adept at touching the body to ease pain. Playwright Duras is skilled at touching a woman's psyche to expose pain. And love, and loathing-the heart's peopled wound. And a claustrophobically confined...