Word: plays
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...dangers of presenting plays that no one ever presents is that you may find out that there is a very good reason for not presenting them. Twice this season Tufts Arena Theatre has made this embarrassing discovery. Their production this week, The Chalk Garden by Enid Bagnold, is a lot less esoteric than their last two shows, but it is also a much better play...
...symbolism of "Chalk Garden" depends on the fact that for most of the play the two quarrels are equivalent. Madrigal and Pinkbell dispute for control of Mrs. St. Maugham's chalk garden. Pinkbell has always had control over it, and when Madrigal arrives she completely inverts all of Pinkbell's commands and shows signs of being able to bring life out of the almost sterile soil. Similarly, Miss Madrigal changes the way in which Laurel is being brought up. Laurel ran away to her grandmother on the night before her mother remarried. However, Miss Madrigal sees in the mother...
Bernard Shaw's "three-ring circus," as H. L. Mencken called Man and Superman, "with Ibsen doing running high jumps; Schopenhauer playing the Calliope and Nietzsche selling peanuts in the reserved seats," runs a paltry three hours and fifteen minutes in its deft and buoyant revival by the Group 20 Players. In order to make this enormous masterwork fit such a brief compass, the usual expedient is to cut the dream scene in hell, a glorious ideological quartet for voices, specifically designed by the author as a detachable interlude. The reigning powers at Group 20 have decided to leave...
...Superman had its inception, says its author with a perfectly straight face, in a suggestion by the critic A. B. Walkley that Shaw write a play about Don Juan. The old story of the Spanish libertine and defier of God had for Shaw two aspects, the sexual and the philosophical. These produced, or at least informed, respectively, the play and the dream-scene within it, which together justify the subtitle of Man and Superman, "a Comedy and a Philosophy." (This is not to say, of course, that the main play lacks philosophy or the interlude lacks comedy. Shaw's peculiar...
...TIME, May 18), the beat Boccaccio's exuberant salute to boyhood. It follows Jack Duluoz and his roughneck buddies from the time they pass puberty (timidly, as if it were a haunted house at midnight) beyond the point at which Duluoz leaves Lowell, Mass., as Kerouac did, to play football for Columbia. Both books are written in the author's customary form, which is to say, utter formlessness. But while the disjointed episodes of Doctor Sax added up-after a number of sizable subtractions-to a vivid picture of mill-town childhood, the gush of recollection in Maggie...