Word: scenes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...ailing mother at Presbyterian. They put him on hold, and at this point he loses it. He hurls the Byron the lovers once caressed about the apartment, with all her precious books. Insanity, it seems, is contagious: she grabs a letter opener and stabs him. From here, the scene changes to the hospital where he and his mother spend an hour and a half rehashing their unimaginative pasts, their guilt, their dreams. He even has a Rosebud--as a baby, his mother used him to cudgel a fellow who rejected her. Hence her numerous suicide attempts; hence her neglect...
...that all three of the characters are so consistently loco that we become dulled by it. There should be a doorman or a maid or something--someone to set off the shrieking and flyings ashtrays. That, or a tauter script. After the play's rambling dialogues, its climactic scene in which Scooper leaves his blind mother talking to a wheelchair while he and Dierdre run off (to Doubleday?) leaves you cold...
...ONLY PERFORMANCE that approaches Clemenson's is Grace Shobet's courageous Paulina, and the scenes between Shohet and Clemenson are the best in the play. Shohet outshines Kim Bendheim (Hermione), who is distractingly nervous in the opening scene but rallies to embody virtue, as Shakespeare intended. Bendheim is particularly strong in her trial scene, where Redford's blocking is also at its best--simply but effectively showing the relative virtues of the characters. Hermione stands on a small box above all her accusers; with their backs to the audience...
After this scene begins the perilous descent into the cheap gimmickery of the fourth act. David Levi's Camillo is a barometer for the travesties of this act. Levi starts as a glorious Camillo, wonderfully obsequious to his lord but courageous enough to flee with the King of Bohemia. Levi enters the fourth act wearing a turbanlike sunbonnet and granny sunglasses, doing a mincing dance. The Adams House crowd roared...
Finally, however, Redford the musical comedy director goes home and Redford the Shakespearian director returns. The last scene is as difficult to present as the eye-gouging scene in King Lear. Redford stages it identically to the courtroom scene, with Hermione on a pedestal above the rest of the players. It is a beautiful idea, uniting the play--allowing the virtue of Hermione to conquer all this time around. Clemenson once again masters the complexity of his role, as he wondrously discovers that the statue is in fact his living wife...