Word: playgoer
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...Peace. When a massive novel is adapted for the stage, what the playgoer almost invariably sees is the skeleton of the book and the embryo of a play. A sense of events and characters killed for lack of space, of people and relationships underdeveloped for lack of time is present in this Phoenix Theater presentation of the Tolstoy classic, but it has an evocative life that refuses to be smothered. Thanks to Ellis Rabb's inventive direction, a substantial fraction of the surge, scope and thematic intention of the novel comes over the footlights...
Tiny Alice, by Edward Albee, is a delaying action of adroit theatricality designed to conceal a clutter of confused thought. Albee preaches "resign yourself to the mysteries," but in this quasi-metaphysical suspense melodrama he practices only mystification. He brings the playgoer through the Nietzschean revelation that "God is dead" to the Sartrean discovery of the absurdity of existence. Albee adds that man creates God in his own image, a profundity he presumably shares with many sophomores, past and present. Who's Afraid of Virginia Wool)? rang with the brassy gong of reality; Tiny Alice is a tinny allegory...
...ROOM and A SLIGHT ACHE inject Harold Pinter's special menace-and-dread serum directly into a playgoer's veins...
...ROOM and A SLIGHT ACHE inject Harold Pinter's special menace-and-dread serum directly into a playgoer's veins...
...Room and A Slight Ache. Harold Pinter's plays not only have plots; they often seem to be plots. He conspires to elude, delude, tease, frustrate, irritate, and mystify the audience, all of course to a highly salutary end. Pinter leads the playgoer very far from home to signify that something at the mysterious heart of human existence consists in being precisely there-very far from home. The Room and A Slight Ache are early Pinter one-acters of quasi-comic menace, not always dexterous but distinctly absorbing, the work of a man forming his own indelible dramatic signature...