Word: playgoers
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Good drama and absorbing theater are often intermingled and sometimes confused with each other. In solid drama, the playgoer is frequently told truths that he either has forgotten or never knew. In effective theater, the playgoer is sometimes seduced by the winning way in which lies can be told onstage, and by emotionally charged sophistries. This brand of engrossing theatricality is precisely what one gets in Child's Play, a melodramatic first play by Robert Marasco, 33, that resembles nothing so much as a scary bedtime story...
After this, a shut-eyed journey through a maze begins. In the maze, a man or a woman, alternately, leads the playgoer by the hand. They whisper and murmur, making sounds that seem like endearments. There are caresses, lips brush one's cheeks and one responds in kind. One's hands are perfumed with honeysuckle. A piece of apple may be popped into one's mouth...
...Sheep on the Runway, is a cartoon allegory. Flush with military hardware but low on brainpower, a group of bumbling, do-good-ing, fast-talking Americans lead a small, neutral Himalayan nation in Asia into a deadly heap of trouble. The difficulty with themes like this is that a playgoer is not quite sure whether he is experiencing the shock or the drone of recognition. An audience should never know as much as or more about a play than the playwright does...
...implicit judgment on a civilization that plummets from its zenith to its lowest depths. The inmates of the death camp spend most of the evening dumping each other in and out of wheelbarrows, piecing together homely sections of stovepipe and finally, one by one, entering a crematorium. The playgoer's knowledge that the pipes that the members of the cast have strung about the stage will channel the smoke of their own burning flesh makes Akropolis the most powerful indictment of genocide that has been rendered in the theater...
...reason for this is that both playgoer and actor are forced to divest themselves of casual everyday preoccupations and behavior patterns. As Grotowski puts it, he wants to demonstrate "what is behind the mask of common vision: the dialectics of human behavior. At a moment of psychic shock, a moment of terror, of mortal danger or tremendous joy, a man does not behave 'naturally.' " By attacking the whole concept of natural behavior, Grotowski divorces himself from the cult of psychological realism, as exemplified, in the Actors' Studio. The Actors' Studio idea is that the self...