Word: plays
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Betweentimes, he slipped out of the palace to play polo and cricket, to take his young son sailing. Not even the Queen herself was immune from her husband's restless energy. "I think Prince Philip is mad," she once exclaimed to a palace servant, as her husband, bored stiff with a moment of inactivity, darted out of the palace door in a cocoon of sweaters, to "work up a sweat." During their marriage, Elizabeth has succeeded to some extent in calming her impetuous husband, restraining his often explosive impatience ("Philip," she is often heard to remonstrate...
...Egghead (by Molly Kazan) is a contemporary play about a not-very-contemporary-minded professor. Hank Parson is full of high-minded intolerances, grants his seemingly dumb wife the freedom of thought to agree with him, chants ancient war cries while ignoring current wars. Then the FBI comes investigating a favorite former student of his, a brilliant Negro. Certain that the student is not a Communist and equally certain why he is being smeared as one, Parson rushes to his defense and brings him to the college to speak. All too soon, by way of his wife's sleuthing...
...Maiden and Lloyd Richards as the Liberal and the Communist, rewardingly well acted. Again and again it vitalizes the issues at the same time that-with small talk and small children, dinner-party fiascos and marital spats-it humanizes the atmosphere. What it does not do-what a message play so seldom can do-is to create flesh-and-blood characters who really seem to shape and chart their own lives...
...plotting. Playwright Kazan, onetime play reader for the Theatre Guild and wife of Director Elia Kazan, must eventually abandon action for argument. This means a drop in dramatic force. Thus, when the student unequivocally assures his worried benefactor that he is not a Communist, he seems morally much more horrifying than when, later on, he gives all the reasons why he is one. In the last act The Egghead becomes a lively enough symposium, but in any creative sense it really ceases to be a play...
...throated, old-style theater. Its smallest scene is a Big Scene; it tosses mere suicide into a scene shift. A sound playwright, Schiller begins virtually at the end-with the Queen of Scots' rash, stormy, ill-starred life behind her and the peers condemning her to death. The play itself, though aswirl with intrigue, assassination plots and lust-devoured deliverers, really turns on whether Mary's royal cousin Elizabeth will sign the death warrant. The scene shifts back and forth between Mary (Irene Worth) in her castle prison and an autocratic but waveringly feminine Elizabeth (Eva Le Gallienne...