Word: playing
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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What, then, are the lessons to be learned from Grotowski and his magnificently trained ensemble company? First and foremost, that in serious drama there is no substitute for intensity. A play is like a magnifying glass that focuses the full heat of the sun on the head of a pin. Grotowski has discovered that the smaller the audience the greater the intensity. The relationship between actor and audience is subtly altered from performer and spectator to a merging of personality in which each somehow acquires the identity of the other and suffers the same strife of soul...
...play is vaguely set in Japan in about the 17th, 18th or 19th century. Dramatic purists might reject the entire work as being similarly vague, as too often cloaking murk in mystification. The action unfolds like a series of semi-related Japanese prints, some limpidly serene, others viscerally gory...
Instead, he encounters the world. A power-mad dictator, Shogo, establishes a great city but it is overthrown by Blimpish invaders blasting away with gunboats and Christian hymns. This regime establishes an inner tyranny of sin and guilt, and it too collapses. At play's end a nude man, all but drowned, clambers out of a river and towels himself off-the naked ape-a genius at survival and a dunce at self-transcendence...
...second one. So arduous is this struggle, so embedded in a writer's marrow, that he almost always devotes one autobiographical work to it. Playwright Oliver Hailey's Who's Happy Now? may not be autobiographical, but it has the indelible sound of private experience. His play belongs among the most perceptive portrayals of the son-father relationship that have been brought to the stage. Its special quality is that it is an Oedipal farce, zany, effervescently comic and full of as many crazy laughs as a clock has ticks...
...chopping block. The father vows that he will not touch the cake. Grudgingly, he accepts a piece, bites skeptically into it, whereupon his face unclouds with delight as he discovers that the cake is made of meat. Moments like that are rare in a season, let alone a play, and they make Who's Happy Now? a minor treasure...