Word: reunioner
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Family Reunion (by T. S. Eliot) opened a season at the off-Broadway Phoenix Theater that will consist of works by Nobel prizewinners. Though written 19 years ago, The Family Reunion has, perhaps with reason, never before been professionally staged in the U.S. It is difficult to stage, since both the inwardness of its drama and the trickiness of its dramaturgy are difficult to project. Yet the play is worth producing, however serious its shortcomings. For it more than endeavors; it experiments. And it not only has a certain academic interest where it fails, but where it succeeds...
Eliot himself, one of his play's harshest critics, has deplored its not fusing Greek story with modern one, its exalting "versification at the expense of plot and character." And all too often The Family Reunion seems remote just where it should be intense, seems to be abstraction without even the vividness of allegory. Bloodless, it fails to cut quite to the bone; it is only those inwardly dead in the play who ever seem outwardly alive...
...though never really dramatic, The Family Reunion can become suddenly theatrical; its Chorus of Uncles and Aunts, although too selfconscious, can be amusing or striking; the atmosphere can quiver with menace; and the expertly managed verse is flexible as other things are rigid. Stuart Vaughan's sound staging and Norris Houghton's shapely set make for helpfully stylized effects, although a cast that includes Florence Reed, Lillian Gish and Fritz Weaver tends to act in varying styles. The cast, understandably, come off best where Eliot did-with the language...
...University Professor received a Pulitzer Prize in 1938 for his "Road to Reunion," a study of the reconstruction days in the South. He was both Provost and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences from...
...After a while, the latter activity exceeded the former, and when the group played a recording of the late Merrill Moore reading "Death is the only language death can speak," along with several other poems on the same subject, some in the audience found the idea of the fugitive reunion beginning to cloy...