Word: raisonneur
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Scottie Templeton is one such com pulsive performer. To him, silence is gelding and only two sounds are pleasing: his own voice and his listener's laughter. As the central character, comic relief, raisonneur and raison d'être of Bernard Slade's play Tribute, Scottie kept the jokes flowing as his world collapsed like a burlesque banana's baggy pants. On Broadway, as incarnated by Jack Lemmon, Scottie was a sympathetic soul. With the footlights acting as a DMZ between character and playgoer, Scottie could be abstracted and romanticized: he was the fatally ill trouper...
...Gough, as Angelique, is like a starry-eyed, dim-witted girl from Vassar. Burton Gaige, her lover, who wears a brown jacket, enormous gold pantaloons, and a long curly blond wig, looks more like the Cowardly Lion than Achilles. And Mike Kapetan, as Beralde, who should be the raisonneur of the play, is for some reason dressed in bright purple and a red wig and manages to come off like a patsy...
...Stepfather, who is the play's raisonneur, draws a few morals from his position inside his story, which only serve to indicate that Pirandello is in doubt about the difference between a profundity and a platitude. But the Stepfather's long speech, to the effect that the Characters are more real than the "real" actors, is subtle and intriguing, and so is the dramatic embodiment of this theme in a great entanglement of paradoxes: the Characters are really actors who pretend to be characters demanding to be acted, the Actors are really pretending to be other actors pretending...
Individual competence characterized almost all of the principal roles. As the raisonneur and heavy-duty comedian, Walter Aikman showed confidence and good taste, while his various musical numbers were well-sung. William Whitehead appeared only in the last act, but his duet "Down Among the Dead Men" with Aikman was the high point of the show. Indeed, the ensemble numbers throughout showed more skill and confidence than the solos. Francis MacNutt's general buffoonery as Hodge, the manservant, carried the play through its weakest moments with uproarious success. Dick Murphy and Peter Davison were properly romantic over Marty Hopkins...
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