Word: pyramus
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...trouble lies elsewhere. And it is not difficult to surmise what happened. Cyril Ritchard is invited to play the rich comic part of Bottom the Weaver. Now you will recall that Bottom and his five fellow artisans are preparing to act out the tale of Pyramus and Thisby as part of the entertainment at the wedding of Duke Theseus and Hippolyta. Bottom is assigned the role of Pyramus. Uncontent, he pleads, "Let me play the lion too." He is restricted to Pyramus, but the idea is planted...
...ELIAS FRIEDENSOHN, 40, like many other artists today, shifts easily between painting and sculpture. His delicate pencil drawings and scruffy oils, which emphasize "the masks people wear which stand in the way of communication," have won him Fulbright and Guggenheim fellowships. His Pyramus & Thisbe is a dial-version of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, lovers, who can communicate only through a hole in a wall. In the painted epoxy sculpture, Thisbe appears only as an ear modeled inside the back door of the pay phone...
...laudable portrayals of the evening do belong to Evans. The first is Biron's soliloquy "And I, forsooth, in love!" from Loye's Labour's Lost. The second is the scene in Midsummer Night's Dream where Bottom and his cronies prepare the "Pyramus and Thisbe" episode; here Evans, in a delightful virtuosic display, takes all the roles himself. The only tamdem bit that builds up any dramatic power at all is the closet scene from Hamlet, in which Miss Hayes' Gertrude is passable...
...story and the dialogue, though mildly abridged, are purely Shakespeare's. Lob and lovers, oafs and ouphes by peradventure meet and mischief in the wold, and afterward convene at court to celebrate the prince's nuptials with "The Most Lamentable Comedy, and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisby," performed by a cast of coxcomical clods...
Missing is its air of fairyland, all but missing its marvelous moon-drenched poetry. But largely missing too are Hermia and Helena and their supporting cast of bores. What remains are the comic ad-ventures of Bottom and his fellow bumpkins, culminating in the uproarious production of Pyramus & Thisbe before the Duke. To many in the first-night audience, Shakespeare seemed almost as good as Billy Rose's Aquacade...