Word: reacted
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Streisand first read the Singer story in 1968, the year of her Funny Girl movie debut, and the single-minded passion that she brought to the project encourages skepticism. Like Streisand and the character she plays, Yentl is indeed aggressive, exotic, oversize, polarizing. No one is likely to react indifferently to this one-woman band. But as the long, lush picture gains momentum and confidence, it admits the viewer to a beguiling world where emotions can bubble out of low comedy, where familial friendship and carnal love intersect, where the dead exert their tenacious influence on the living...
WHILE MOST OF THE performances are competent, few rise above the level of mediocrity imposed by lackluster dialogue and listless direction; the actors tend to react individually, rather than together as a dynamic company...
...considerations of dramatic coherence cannot have numbered high among them. The female lead (Jobeth Williams) dies offscreen, her passing noted in just a line or two of dialogue. Another major character, a farmer and family man (John Cullum), gets shot by squatters, and his widowed wife and orphaned children react only by turning toward the sound of the gun. Charac ters tumble in and out like cards in a dropped deck...
Once he had the idea Kenney said that play practically wrote itself. "Once you start writing the characters take over you realize that this character must react in a certain way or that a speech doesn't go with a certain character...
...freshness yet familiarity of the characters as they originally react to each other for the first time maintains the first act. This carries over into the second act when Kenney develops the characters by one on one confrontations such as Joan's fight with her boyfriend and her encounter with Rufus (Michael Hasselmo) the long hairdo 60s leftover...