Word: sauls
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...TERM "Story Theatre" describes a certain type of play using imaginative improvisations, direct interchange with the audience and dialogue interspersed with songs and chants. Beginner's Luck, a new play based on the Biblical tale of King Saul and David now running at the Reality Theater in Boston, employs such an approach, but rather than adding a new dimension to the narrative, it breaks up the plot's continuity and mars some of the play's best-written scenes...
...play describes the battle for power between King Saul of Israel and the shepherd boy David over who should sit on the throne, as narrated in the two books of Samuel. Jon Lipsky, the playwright, remains faithful to the Biblical narrative but takes extensive liberties with the characters. He depicts Saul (Tim McDonough), a donkey-driver unexpectedly lifted to power, as a bumbling, good-natured clown rather than following the original portrait of a man fated to disobey God's commands. David (Suzanne Baxstresser), the young hero of the tale, emerges as a Machiavellian schemer whose love of power makes...
...PLOT OF THE PLAY generally follows the Biblical narrative: Samuel chooses Saul when the Israelites clamor for a king. Saul, a study in kingly ineptitude, disappoints Samuel in war and in government; consequently, Samuel shifts his favor secretly to David. David lives with Saul, who comes to love him as a son; but alas, David schemes to take power, aided by Samuel. A growing rivalry between the two leads David to defect to the Philistines, a belligerent tribe. David wins the battle, then drives the Philistines out, and feigns a sense of bereavement over the death of Saul...
...fairly simple plot--had Lipsky not chosen to interrupt the flow of the narrative with digressions and, in one case, an audience sing-along in the especially feeble Act I. At times Lipsky contrasts very well for comic effect the modern simplicity of Saul's words with the more formal diction of the other characters. For example, in the middle of a long tirade by Samuel, Saul interjects, "You know, you're a very gloomy person." But after a while, the wide-eyed stuff gets a bit grating...
...play, "Lost Cookies," which ran at Eliot House last term, was written last summer by Kramer and Adam Bellows, a Princeton student and son of Nobel Laureate Saul Bellow...