Word: playing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...sense of will-lessness afflicts modern man, the conviction that he cannot affect events or even control his own destiny. Beckett symbolizes this by immobilizing his characters, in ashcans in Endgame, in urns in Play. In Happy Days, the heroine Winnie (Irene Worth) is buried up to her waist in the first scene and up to her neck in the second. Whereas Winnie is one of life's nonstop talkers, an autobiographiliac, her husband Willie (George Voskovec) is laconic and scarcely visible until the very end of the play. Yet his absence constitutes a powerful presence. In her garrulous...
...Beckett is the master of the interior monologue. But drama breathes only in dialogue. Hamlet is not babbling to himself in the four great inebriant soliloquies; he is addressing questions to his tormented soul, his troubled mind, his impotent will, and the sultry air resonates. In his one-character play, Krapp's Last Tape, Beckett took some notice of this problem. Between his senile musings and avid munching on a banana, Krapp turns on a tape recorder that relates all the romantic ardor and wistful yearnings of an earlier self. Thus, a kind of dialogue, and a very poignant...
Beckett is more than lucky in this revival at off-Broadway's Public Theater; he is blessed. Entrusting a play to Irene Worth is like investing in the Krugerrand. She is pure gold. Voskovec, in what amounts to a crawl-on part, is admirable. As for Andrei Serban, the ebullient Rumanian-born director-improvisationist, he has had the incredible tact not to tamper with the text. For which relief, much thanks...
Even the site of this weekend's summit is dictated by the fragility of Brezhnev's health. In 1974 Richard Nixon had traveled to Moscow and Gerald Ford to Vladivostok, so protocol required that this time the U.S. play host to the Soviet leader. But Brezhnev's doctors did not want to subject him to the rigors of a transatlantic flight. The agenda for the Vienna summit has been kept as flexible as possible to allow Brezhnev maximum time for naps and ministrations by the physicians in his entourage...
...film does gently remind us of past pleasures, now missed, and it is rather handsomely produced. Maybe, since its creators lack a true-that is to say Mel Brooksian-gift for parody, they would have done better to play the whole thing straight and let us have our nostalgia unalloyed...