Word: playgoers
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...world how sorry he is for himself. The world turns out to be the audience. Self-pity is one of the most powerful weapons in Chekhov's dramatic arsenal, but it only elicits sympathy for his characters because he engages the audience in personal self-pity. The playgoer is not necessarily devastated when the cherry orchard is sold at the auction block or by news that the three sisters never get to Moscow. But it is a rare playgoer who has no nagging, nettling memory of property or money lost, or of a move not made...
Part of the awe Macbeth inspires in a playgoer is that of watching a voracious bird of prey. Sworn in honor to be a trusted host to Duncan, the King, Macbeth swoops on his sleeping sovereign and murders him. As the new King, he wheels on his best friend, Banquo. When a mettlesome foe, Macduff, threatens him, Macbeth's talons are unsheathed to mortally savage Macduff s wife and her entire brood. Finally, all Scotland falls bleeding prey to his gashing beak...
...sometimes feels that he might have aided Freud in exploring further subbasements of the id. However, the effects are too explicit to be truly erotic. In sequences of simulated copulation, such as "The Dream Barre" and a pot-induced orgy called "Joint Endeavor," a playgoer may have the distasteful and disconcerting sensation that he has been cast as a practicing voyeur. This, indeed, is the underlying trouble with much of Dancin'. It is as if a parade of fertility rites were un der way, always titillating on the surface but devoid of any celebration of life. A guarded cynicism...
Shaw is the autocrat of the blackboard. His writing hand flies furiously across the surfaces of his plays, chalking up social, moral and intellectual lessons for the playgoer-students. The class almost always relishes the talking jags of the sage of Ayot St. Lawrence, for he never created a major character who was not indubitably and ebulliently G.B.S...
Whether or not the Dracula boom is a solid vote for primordial superstition, it is certainly a solid boost for fun and may even contain essential elements of theatricality that have been too long neglected. When, for instance, has a playgoer been dazzled and dominated by a set rather than merely giving it the perfunctory opening-curtain applause? Edward Corey's set for Dracula at Manhattan's Martin Beck Theater is an eye-blinker. Broody, vaulting, magisterial, colored in shades of bleakest gray, it is a psychic tomb out of Edgar Allan Poe's haunted imagination...