Word: rauch
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Which is one reason, at least, why Bill Rauch's style so effectively transforms this Romeo and Juliet in to a massive but vitally exciting production, a weird semi-suburban epic that often lumbers but almost never drags. Rauch's main talent lies in evoking an intricate, extensive, wholly believable world from a few strategically placed details. He does it so surely and imaginatively that, in this instance, the viewer occasionally becomes a trifle dizzy at the overlapping vistas. More to the point. Rauch stumbles on his own inventiveness when a device or a setting draws too much attention...
...themes Rauch pursues most vigorously is the generation gap motif; he has said he can't shake the radical impression that if the young lovers had only appealed to their families for help, unexpected understanding might have Everett the disaster. And whether any invention of the sort comes from the script or not-presumably not-it comes through clearly when played. Both lovers appear awkward and withdrawn at home. becoming human and open only to each other...
Luckily, Rausch edits most of the didactic verse--such as Auden's version of T.S. Eliot's conclusion to The Wasteland (Auden: "Repent... Unite ... Act"), or his awkwardly Marxist closing line: "To each his need, from each his power." Rauch leaves in those speeches pointing to the concerns more relevant to his summer audience: "Take sex, for instance... Sometimes it's funny and sometimes it's said, but it's always hanging about like a smell of drains...
This perhaps is best taken and clung to as the focal point of the play: the particularly modern form of personal inauthenticity, of plastic and degrading relationships, of--yes, once again--alienation. Rauch obliterates most of the political alienation which Auden ties to the malaise of the individual. The director instand emphasizes the distorted manner in which the Victorian sexual logacy has been incorporated into...
...Francis Crewe makes an entrance, and we see the beginnings of the first real relationship for the hand-holding Alan Norman. The emotions Rauch creates with this interaction are probably not opposed to those intended by Auden and Isherwood. Unfortunately, however, the lack of personal understanding we have for Alan Norman's fall or for his relationship with Crewe stems not from the acting or the directing, but from the play itself...