Word: quentins
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...kaleidoscopic first act mixes Quentin's recent and distant memories, showing almost immediately Quentin's four women: Louise, his first wife; Maggie, his second; Holga, to be his next; and Felice, a young dancer who brought him love but asked for no committment, unlike the other three women. We see a family disaster, his father's financial ruin; a political catastrophe--the decision of Mickey, a lawyer, to "name the names" to The Committee--and a moral catastrophe--the suicide of Lou, Mickey and Quentin's old professor of law, when no one but Quentin would support him against...
Maggie thrusts herself upon a bewildered Quentin, who quickly sees the falsehood of loving her. "The first honor... was that I hadn't tried to go to bed with her! God, the hypocrisy!... Because, I was only afraid, and she took it for a tribute to her...'value'!" Yet he attempts to bring her "limitless love." And throughout the second act, Maggie's act, Quentin's people punctuate the action of his memory with sudden stares or snatches from past dialogue. At all the accusations, at Maggie's drugged breathing, at Holga's weeping at the ruins of a concentration...
What one remembers at the theatre exit, however, are not Quentin's monologues but the carefully written group scenes, the distillations of a life that could provide several plays. One just doesn't listen to Quentin's speeches, and his generalized guilt becomes real only in what is now the largest of dramatic commonplaces, the mass murders of Nazi Germany. Quentin's prolix introspection provides only relaxation before the next rise of tension, the scenes that are the play's reality. As such, After the Fall is a dramatist's tour de force, but not a live play...
...Miller's people cannot, unlike J. Alfred Prufrock or Moses E. Herzog, asks the big questions and yet stay in the skins their creators gave them. When Charley, in Death of a Salesman, tries to make Willy Loman the embodiment of the tragic salesman, he sounds phony. And when Quentin speaks of all men's guilt as his own, he too sounds phony. He is not a big enough figure to pass his private disasters off as the disasters...
Still, the debilitating shock is there, and this touring company skillfully meets the play's demanding range of emotion. Charles Aidman's Quentin grows quietly, barely changing tone in most of the first act, until his final scene with Louise. The actor's mental and physical exhaustion by the end of the three hours on stage, mirrors that of the character, who has relived the most horrible moments of his life. Judi West as Maggie creates, in her first scene, the uneasiness we should expect even without our foreknowledge of Maggie's suicide. She is a pitiable, blond rag doll...