Word: rabbe
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...failed him, and in the end destroyed him. She has continued through life looking for an anachronism--a 19th-century gentleman in a hard, fast-moving 20th-century world where gentleness in a man has become synonymous with weakness and or effeminacy. Mitch is her saving grace, but Mr. Rabb gives little emphasis to Blanche's desire to marry Mitch. He emphasizes only her vulnerability, and to play only her incapability to survive is merely to play the result of the situation. One must not ignore her courage and her sincerity...
Miss Humphrey's performance, within the range of Mr. Rabb's interpretation, is carefully etched and compellingly played. Her drunk scene with Mitch towards the end of Act II is excellent. Standing in the middle of a large brass bed, she cries out her soul like an hysterical child, desperately pleading for magic magic, not realism. She can give you the virgin-like innocence of a child one minute and the drunken swagger of a two-bit slut the next. There is a fine Blanche latent here! There are some strang inflections and an unusual clipped speech that often give...
Robert Blackburn as Stanley is strong, masculine, and sincere, but there is little that is animal about him. He is no survivor of the Stone Age. Mr. Rabb would have us believe that Streetcar is "a study in survival." All that survives from this struggle is Stanley and his off-spring. Surely this sort of insensitive good-naturedness is not the emerging 20th-century...
...Rabb is an intelligent and imaginative director. But no matter what values he feels may have changed in Streetcar, I'm afraid the protagonist of the play has not. This is not Stanley's play nor ever will be, and to try and make it so by removing every trace of grace and nobility from Blanche, leaving her as little more than a drunken whore, is hardly fair to Mr. Williams. Once this is done, the play is no longer Blanche's tragedy, nor does it become Stanley's triumph, but rather an extended sort of fertility rite. "Procreative power...
...childlike cries of self-pity and loneliness, but when he touches on a nerve of human experience, as he most certainly can, something quite electric takes place and suddenly the stage is filled with light. In his attempt to depart as thoroughly as possible from the Broadway production, Mr. Rabb fails to let us see that light, and gives us instead something more like the gaudy, flashing neon signs that outline his production--occasionally bright, but seldom brilliant