Word: plays
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...lady is, of course, Countess Aurelia--the title personage of Jean Giraudoux's The Madwoman of Chaillot (La folle de Chaillot). Giraudoux wrote three versions of this play shortly before he died in 1944. Had he lived longer he could not have improved it much; indeed, the mad tea party is absolutely perfect. He never wrote a greater play, and only his Electre can perhaps equal...
...Tufts cast deserves real credit for its performance. Uncoordinated until now, it clicks crisply; and the machinery of America, moving slowly at first, warms and speeds up as the play progresses. The play's farrago of dramatic styles, songs, dances and persons is difficult to harmonize, but the loosely knit structure of the play is bound into a tightly cohesive knot, creating a final fluidity. Leads and choruses maintain the spritely and varying rhythms of American life throughout. The same persons flying-shuttled in and out of different roles, weaving the loom of America. Robert Dargie as Uncle...
...time when contemporary American drama consists largely of stillborn carbon copies of Ibsen, Shaw and Chek- hov, Kerr departs from realism, naturalism and contemporary social problems. Turning to Aristophanic comedy and American history, he weaves a very refreshing and unusual play that injects new life and variety into the Iceberg American theatre, and which, baring the bedrock of American ideals and tradition, reveals the strains of a nation's soul through song, fables and poesy, and so utterly avoids didactic realism...
...play is a satire, partly poetic, about greed and worshippers of the Golden Calf. A group of men want to drill for oil right under Paris in order to wage a destructive war. The countess and her cohorts find a way of trying them in absentia by proxy, and she then "exterminates" them (how I will not reveal...
...Countess is not alone in her madness. She has three mad colleagues, and is surrounded by a large number of lesser persons all of whom have a few screws loose. In fact, every single character in the play seems to be mad in at least one way. The point is, though, that it's the war-bent men who are really mad; the Countess and her entourage may be completely crazy in a lot of small matters, but they are quite sane in things that count. The Countess not only is able to get rid of the malefactors...