Word: plot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...amusing, like his use of several mannequins to fill various roles for which he lacked actors; but the merging of more important roles, the cutting and chopping of important scenes, and the self-consciousness of each departure from Shakespeare unnerve the audience and often make the play's plot incomprehensible. Sellars might just as well have bounded on stage, done a headstand, cried "look at me!" before the curtain rose, and let the play proceed with a modicum of sensibility...
This particular actor-saving ploy on Sellars' part costs him an entire half of the play's plot. No one in the audience who has not read Much Ado About Nothing beforehand can make sense of the main romantic plot of Claudio (Paul Redford) and Hero (Grace Shohet) without the separate Dons...
...Frutkoff are effective, the former in a huge chestplate that makes it virtually impossible for him to sit down. Sellars' direction of their scenes, too, seems more careful. He dims the lights to a ghostly blue and has his pianists play wild chase music for their detection of the plot against Hero...
...before, most notably by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. in A Thousand Days. But Wyden, a former editor at the Saturday Evening Post, McCall's and Ladies' Home Journal, is not satisfied with shadows and rumors. He retraces every false step, sparing no one and no institution. The plot was conceived and crafted at the CIA largely by a cerebral chief of covert operations, Richard Bissell Jr. It had been passed on to President Kennedy by an unenthusiastic-but not disapproving-President Eisenhower. In the naive belief that U.S. involvement could be concealed, Kennedy kept telling...
...dialogue of his characters: "Marian looked like a small horse, perhaps a pony, who had read Vogue and believed it." And he has not lost his conductor's ear for the music and lilt of Boston Irish patois. Here the punch lines are stronger than the plot lines, but Higgins' characters are so shrewdly observed by Year's end, as Edgar confronts Peter, that it is impossible to disagree with his summary: "You're a son of a bitch yourself, but now you've stopped pretending that you aren't. That is our accomplishment...