Word: ponazecki
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...second one-acter called Witness finds McNally in fine comic and caustic fettle. Again a gagged victim is trussed up in a chair, this time a man. His captor (Joe Ponazecki) hopes to assassinate the President of the U.S. during a motorcade, and he wants a witness to his own sanity in committing the act. The stuff of madness has been crammed into this young would-be assassin's head, principally by avid newspaper reading and televiewing. He knows all about cabinet crises in Lebanon, but he doesn't know right from wrong. He hopes to resolve...
...title have had their lives suspended by their fictional author, who abandoned his play before completing their horrible story. Apparitions dressed in deathly black, they visit the evening rehearsal of a Charles stage production, looking for another author to release them from their torturing memories. Flattering the Director (Joe Ponazecki) and explaining their plight, they alternately relive the painful events of their in-escapable past and beg the cast to stage their story. Pirandello's craft reaches its height in the second act, where he switches with startling case between the horror of the character's fictional world...
Murray's staging often accentuates his actors' failures instead of off-setting them. For example, though Ponazecki totally misplays the part of the Director (an unbelievably difficult role), his constant movements around the stage may be more at fault than his disconcerting effiminacy. Lloyd Battista does some quite impressive acting as the son, but he is occasionally forced into ridiculous acrobatics in his nervous pacing of the stage. Above all, Murray fails to exploit the dramatic possibilities of the boy's climactic suicide. In some productions, the boy terrorizes the cast and family with his pistol while shrinking like...
| 1 |