Word: plays
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...ambitious published work to date. The segment printed in The Advocate is more suggestive than satisfying--yet one must make allowances for First Acts because, in establishing characters and their relations to each other, a playwright must talk and explain. Hopefully, Kopit's audience will find in the unfinished play a meaning and point of view that his earlier work has lacked...
Certainly he gives indications he will provide. Set in a place somewhere in Louisiana that is not altogether unlike a Williams, a Faulkner, a Welty locale, Kopit's play concerns the visit of an old school friend to the home of a robust insurance man, his supremely sensitive wife, and their brattish children. The visitor, Emmanuel Moon, a graciously sinister spectre, says he has come to collect on an adolescent promise made by George "Chopper" Feering, a raging "bull" who raised living standards in the country by convincing dying old men to buy insurance instead of medical care...
Mannie's character is unfortunately undeveloped thus far; Joanna, ignorant of Chopper's past relations with Mannie, seems unduly and too suddenly horrified by the cat's screech; and the southern lingo seems unnecessary because any director knows how white trash talks without Kopit's telling him. But the play moves quickly and convincingly, perhaps as an aping of Williams, but not without its own vigor...
Sadly enough, George Stevens' movie version of The Diary of Anne Frank is not up to the play. Perhaps he watered down the original impact to let sleeping animosities lie. But whatever his reasons for saccharine-coating the pill, (with tender smiles, violin music and so forth), Stevens turned out a slightly flabby film...
...situation itself fades into a war movie cliche--complete with goose-stepping, bombing and all the rest of it--as the beauty of Anne Frank's character dissolves into naughty cuteness, we are left with eight people who flirt, fight, and fret in a disappointingly usual way. The play managed, without ever seeming to strain, to suggest how sustained tension and continuous confinement would affect them, while the film injects these changes artificially...