Word: playgoer
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...this cannon is virtually the only conversation piece that Director Tyrone Guthrie has permitted himself. His Henry V is the least tricked-up Shakespearean production that Guthrie has ever been associated with in the U.S. Except for cutting some lines for pace, he trusts the author and the playgoer, for a change, and the play flashes like an unsheathed sword, keen, virile, inescapably compelling. It is a patriot's poem of valor, a memorial ode written in the bright and acrid air of combat for all men who ever fought, bled and died for their country's honor...
Blues for Mr. Charlie, by James Baldwin, sabotages most of its own good purposes. It means to be an eloquent cry from the heart of the Negro's hurt but spends itself showering rhetorical spleen on the white man. It aims to seize the conscience but grabs the playgoer's lapel instead, like a standing grievance committee. It strives to be fresh, but its story of Southern shotgun justice is overly familiar, and what powers Mr. Charlie is not its topical subject but a contemporary mood, the taut-nerved spirit of violence that seethes through the play...
...full-length two-character play, each actor has to be at least an actor and a half. Both J. D. Cannon and James Earl Jones are enormously skillful. At first Cannon seems considerate, practical, matter-of-fact, and then his nerves start to sing like high-tension wires. The playgoer senses that he is watching a man hiding from the beast in himself. James Earl Jones can be as quiet as an extinct volcano one moment, and spewing emotional lava across a stage the next. With some actors, words clothe feelings; with Jones, feelings unclothe words so that joy, rage...
...TROJAN WOMEN. Vanquished and about to be enslaved, the Trojan women eloquently vent their passions to create in the playgoer a desolating sense of the agony of war and the immutability of man's fate...
...right-hand strongman, which he was not, while also creating the illusion that Stalin was capable of nimble ideological disputes with Lenin. Trotsky (Alvin Epstein) is portrayed as a kind of effete dancing master and relegated to a stage-struck walk-on part in the Revolution, so that no playgoer would ever guess that he was looking at the man who forged the Red army...