Word: playgoers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Sleepwalking Tour. The tension should build, but instead it is dissipated. This is partly because the playgoer knows from the first skitterish-tigerish encounter that Chicken and Myrtle are fated to be sexmates. The dialogue is surprisingly colloquial for Williams and lacks the requisite venom or eloquence. Most damagingly of all, the play becomes a sleepwalking tour of the dusty attic of memory. Between coughing bouts, Lot recalls his Oedipalsy life with mother, and Myrtle shuffles through an account of her showgirl days with the Five Hot Shots from Mobile. The actors are uniformly admirable, and Estelle Parsons (Buck Barrow...
...putting his daughter's life before Greek victory. This raises a question of moral ambiguity that runs through the play: Is this a war for a strumpet, or is it against a nest of barbarians who threaten the life of Greece? Euripides refuses to fob off the playgoer with an easy answer, for the question is fraught with pain and death...
...play's moods crosses their faces: they can summon up anxiety, false courage, utter bafflement, and honest fear with a flick of the lip, or a twist of the torso. They give the play's mind a body, and make R. and G. an evening for the playgoer who seeks not to forget but to know himself...
...skull-popping panic, half-dials phones, swigs champagne from a bottle, runs to the door with his scythe and roars out bloody maledictions on "the Goddamn spade frogman." In a performance marvelously sustained at the pitch of brilliance, Jerry Orbach sprays comic vitriol without ever letting the playgoer forget that this man's heart is in a vise of anguish...
What is Stanley's crime? Are Goldberg and McCann agents of a murder ring, symbols of organized society, or instruments of fate? What torture do the pair inflict on Stanley? Rarely has Pinter left more to the playgoer's imagination. The American cast keeps its English accents tidy but not its performances, and Director Alan Schneider lets the first act drowse. Basically, the play lacks the athletic snap and resonance of The Caretaker's dialogue and the musky animal magnetism of The Homecoming family. But whether or not he baffles playgoers, Harold Pinter exerts a modish appeal...