Word: portias
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Helena is the main personage in All's Well. It is easy to see why Shaw so ardently admired the play, because Shakespeare provided in Helena a more striking example of the clever and strong-willed female than he had given us in the Portia of the Merchant of Venice, a type continued by Nora in lbsen's A Doll's House and by such characters from Shaw's own pen as Ann Whitefield. Major Barbara. Hesione Hushabye, and Saint Joan...
...director who sees the countinghouse at the center of the play cannot take seriously Portia's enchanted realm of Belmont, with its fairy-tale plot and flowery sentiments. Miller treats it as either hypocritical or irrelevant. He turns the casket scenes into occasions for extravaganzas of comic stage business. In the famous lyric dialogue between Lorenzo and Jessica ("In such a night as this . . ."), he makes Lorenzo a pipe-puffing bore and has Jessica fall asleep. Thus he undercuts the romantic element of the play, the key to what Shaw called the work's "humanity and poetry...
...couple in town had a spat during the night and headed out of their house in opposite directions; the marshal sat with their children until the parents returned the next morning. On the rare occasions when an escaped convict has been in the vicinity, Mrs. Winders and her bloodhound Portia join police from neighboring areas in the chase. Her most serious current problem is an ubiquitous peeping Tom. "They're the hardest to catch," she says. "But I'd like to put some buckshot into...
...Chan Coulter, a retired Army colonel, credits his one-woman force with providing a "very special kind of protection in our town." But soon University Heights, which hired Mrs. Winders in 1935 when she asked for the job, will have to start looking for a new marshal. Winders and Portia are contemplating retirement. "The council," says the grandmother, "thinks I'm getting loo old to chase cars." The council may have a point. At 70, Esther Winders claims to be the oldest working policewoman in the nation...
...with bravura by Marlo Ferguson in a tarnished Carol Channing wig, he--or, as you begin to accept the play's terms, she--is an irrepressible performer, a one-man version of a Hasty Pudding show. The jokes are bad in a great, extravagant way. (One prisoner, dressed as Portia for a Christmas pageant, lamely explains away the gown he is wearing with, "It's from The Merchant of Venice." Queenie's answer: "Well, take it back then." All right, so you had to have been there.) The point is, if you're expecting merely refined sarcasm, this...