Word: rauch
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Claiming ownership on one side are play wrights W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood. They have left the other claimant, director Bill Rauch, with a verse play which popularizes Marxism in a social and political critique of pre-World War Two bourgeois Europe...
...just this proper feeling which director Rauch tries to evoke: the emotions and the characters of the people involved. But Rauch is given so little personal material of any depth or complexity in the text, that stellar acting is the only solution. With impressive consistency, the humorous touches thrown into this updated version keep the 1935 play entertaining. Brian McCue's series of comic scenes seem to emerge directly from Auden's own witty and slightly bizarre sense of humor. And Max Cantor shines as the ridiculous subjectivist poet who tells Alan Norman that all objects exist only...
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...