Word: prey
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Suddenly, a nongentlemanly caller opens the screen door and asks, as a ruse, for a guy named Joe who supposedly lives there. Raul (James Russo) is one of nature's punks. He exudes malignant animal magnetism. As the world is his jungle, women are his chosen prey. Marjorie tries a feeble ploy about a policeman husband asleep upstairs, but Raul knows better. He rips the phone cord out of the wall and pins Marjorie to the floor as he semi-suffocates her with a pillow...
...there is an even more important reason why he is easy prey: because he bares his soul to us. He lets us see his values, his struggles, the contradictions with which his life is fraught. He chooses to be no more and no less than a human being to us. Not only does this make him open to attack, but it can hurt us if we let it, because it forces us to see our own humanness...
Performers Betty McNally (Mrs. Stockmann), Jim Caudle (Dr. Stockmann), and Colette Auerswald (Petra Stockmann), each fall prey to a common inconsistency--switching indiscriminately from stereotypes to realism, not having developed the characters sufficiently to manage such a switch. Will Johnston (Captain Horster), Erik Corwin (Morten Kitty), and Roger Rignack (Aslaksen), however, are not inconsistent. They simply choose to not develop their characters--period...
What else lies in store? Berg's Wozzeck, perhaps. A demanding performer who turned down a request by Herbert von Karajan to sing Beckmesser because he disagreed with Karajan's concept, Prey is currently mulling a couple of offers to sing the foremost 20th century antihero. He plans to ignore the tradition of croaking and barking the role that has evolved since the challenging opera's premiere in 1925. "Berg wanted a beautiful voice," says Prey. "I want to sing every note as it is written...
...Prey's darker side should not come as too much of a surprise. He confesses an avid interest in spiritualism ("but not in seances") and has a huge library of books on the occult. He bought a summer house on an island off the Danish coast as a refuge for himself, his wife Barbara and their three children, just in case Nostradamus' prediction of a world war comes true. The bleak side of the Teutonic soul occasionally stares out uneasily from behind the affable visage. But it is quickly dispelled with the German equivalent of a verbal shrug...