Word: plays
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...19th-century gentleman in a hard, fast-moving 20th-century world where gentleness in a man has become synonymous with weakness and or effeminacy. Mitch is her saving grace, but Mr. Rabb gives little emphasis to Blanche's desire to marry Mitch. He emphasizes only her vulnerability, and to play only her incapability to survive is merely to play the result of the situation. One must not ignore her courage and her sincerity...
...Daniels provide interesting primitive dances to some wildly orgiastic music. But they are unfortunately not worked into the script carefully enough, and on some of their Pied Piperesque entrances, leading a crowd of fascinated observers, one feels that one is suddenly in the midst of a scene from another play...
...Rabb is an intelligent and imaginative director. But no matter what values he feels may have changed in Streetcar, I'm afraid the protagonist of the play has not. This is not Stanley's play nor ever will be, and to try and make it so by removing every trace of grace and nobility from Blanche, leaving her as little more than a drunken whore, is hardly fair to Mr. Williams. Once this is done, the play is no longer Blanche's tragedy, nor does it become Stanley's triumph, but rather an extended sort of fertility rite. "Procreative power...
Earle Edgerton, who played leading roles in the group's productions last summer and who has also acted with the Poets' Theatre and other local companies, will play the starring role...
...choice of this play marked an act of courage. Few people are familiar with it. Those with any knowledge of the plot have usually acquired it through one of the dozen or so operatic versions, chiefly Nicolai's Merry Wives of Windsor, Verdi's Falstaff, or Vaughan Williams' Sir John in Love. But the directors were willing to gamble (or gambol); and their slot (or slut) machine has come up with three cherries--a winning combination that ought to keep the box office coffers filled and the audience coughers silent...