Word: playgoers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...actor and a director are the play's most impressive assets. In the central role, Donald Pleasence gives a performance of atomic power and blinding virtuosity; Harold Pinter directorially chills the stage to doom temperature. The very first scene bursts on the playgoer with somber eclat. In an elegant private chapel, dim as a catacomb, a finger of light rests on Pleasence as he kneels rapt in prayer. The Verdi Requiem saturates the air like incense. Suddenly, the stage is ablaze with light, louvers are turning, and the backdrop becomes a penthouse view of Manhattan's skyscrapers...
...taking gross liberties with the classics to give them contemporary credence. A U.S. audience is more likely to feel the faint shock of cultural lag. Freshly attuned to the theater of tribal intimacy, with its skin-to-skin actor-audience confrontations and its stereophonic barrage of sound, a playgoer may be startled to see a stylized drama in which each line is pruned, each gesture sculptured, each scene framed...
...nurse the huge cigar; the gruff, lisping voice rasps out even cadences like waves beating on the shore. Many of the words he is given to say, however, seem in closer accord with der Führer Prinzip than with bluff British pragmatism. Never for a moment is the playgoer unaware that this is a Teutonic Churchill and that Hochhuth is still playing the blame game-not so much to prod the consciences of other men as to slough off on them part of the German burden of guilt for the holocausts of war and genocide...
...born in "black revulsion." Black with wrath, Endecott orders Merry Mount burned to the ground and the Indians massacred. The historical moment is a century and a half before the American Revolution, but as the first shots are fired, and puffs of acrid smoke drift across the stage, the playgoer sniffs the unmistakable odor of revolt...
...remarkable thing is that--like Pinter--he does create a real world of living creatures and does draw the playgoer into it. And the Harvard actors and actresses make it a vital, if baffling, world...