Word: rauch
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...BILL RAUCH meets and overcomes this challenge by employing an experimental trick of staging. Seating the audience on the small Agassiz stage, Rauch stages the play in the theatre itself...
...many plays such an inversion would undoubtedly prove disastrous, but in this case it not only matches Chekhov's mood and theme, but carries the playwright's own actions one step further. Chekhov boils the play's plot down to a bare minimum; Rauch abandons the scenery as well. We are left with the bare essence: a group of men and women struggling vainly to communicate with each other and to cope with their loves, their art, and their lives...
...Evett as a surprisingly young and hip friar Lawrence, who appears to function essentially as Romeo's freshman proctor. (In one of the show's nicest and most economical touches. Romeo, visiting Lawrence's cell grabs a Coke from the fridge before settling down on the bed to confess.) Rauch occasionally requires this thoroughly alert crew to do something odd--kill one another with picnic cutlery, for instance, or mutely clutch miscellaneous blankets and bedding around their shoulders in mourning for Juliet's initial "death." But the cast tends to rise to even the most arbitrary occasion, and delivers without...
...similar tendency towards the personal trademark mars Rauch's enigmatic final scene, as one mute autumn leaf flutters slowly out of the overhead grill. But interestingly, a Mercutio and Benvolio, and their depiction as Romeo's childhood pals--avoids this tendency altogether. The women succeed, despite occasional awkwardness, precisely because their gender attracts no notice and the audience soon responds in kind...
...surprisingly the play survives these intrusions. As the company gains momentum and finishes adapting to the language. Rauch's elaborate conception loses its oddity and begins to work like another part of the technologically miraculous set, whose pieces and extensions metamorphose into beds, bathtubs or starry summer nights without detracting from the matter at hand. Likewise as long as Rauch uses his endless vision as a tool and keeps it out of the foot lights, he can work miracles on stage...