Word: playgoer
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Rugantino, a musical transported intact from Rome and sung and spoken in Italian, is a pleasant novelty on Broadway. Unobtrusive English titles are flashed on a narrow screen above the stage to keep the playgoer abreast of action and dialogue. More nearly an operetta than a musical comedy, Rugantino is lavishly and attractively costumed and atmospherically set in Rome in 1830. Its bawdry is innocent, its humor earthy, its love songs are unselfconsciously sentimental...
...Furies who pursue the playwright are his mother, his first wife, and his second wife, Marilyn Monroe. The transparent disguising of himself as a lawyer named Quentin and of Marilyn as a bigtime songstress named Maggie exists to be penetrated, and Miller's uninhibited autobiographical candor poses for playgoer and critic alike the disconcerting task of judging the conduct of his life and his code for the conduct of life. Yet to dispute Miller's moral conclusions, or lack of them, is not to deny the jarring impact of his play, which Director Elia Kazan has charged with...
This quest is electrically charged by Director Cyril Simon. Eleven actors sit facing the audience as ingenious lighting plays over them to orchestrate speeches and scenes like music, so that the playgoer feels that he is experiencing the thematic flow of the hero's life -lyrical, staccato, abrasive, brassy and blue. There are remarkable impressionistic renderings of states of feeling: the disembodied rush of a transcontinental train sucked through the vacuum of night, the empty-souled writhings of some Venice Beach bopniks. But in the end, the hero still seems incapable of drawing the bow of manhood...
...Legacy of Pain. In one of two compelling off-Broadway offerings that do have unity of tone, meaning, and performance, a consciousness of massive injustice and personal sorrow settles movingly upon the playgoer. In White America is a poignant chronicle of the Negro's centuries-old legacy of pain, oppression, and denial, from the days of slavery to the present hour. It is an evening of dramatic readings thoughtfully culled from the statements of Presidents, the reminiscences of ex-slaves and ante-bellum Southern matrons, the rantings of bigots. Sensitive actors make the word intolerance become flesh, tortured, torturing...
...White America, pain is self-contained; in The Trojan Women, grief screams like a woman in childbirth. This Edith Hamilton translation of the Euripides classic has been directed by Michael Cacoyannis with brooding eloquence, cyclonic passion, and such cruel inner hurt that the stoniest playgoer must seek relief in tears. Pain paints the backdrop like a sky of blood. Pain drums the floor boards in the rhythmic open-palmed agony of the bowed women who must become the slaves and bedmates of the conquering Greeks. Pain frantically grips a little boy between his mother's legs before...