Word: schill
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Highhanded, aging, fabulously rich Claire Zachanassian returns to Gullen, the impoverished European town of her birth, to pour money into its lap-on one condition. Town and townspeople can divide a billion marks if they will kill Anton Schill, the man who in Claire's youth denied that her child was his and made her an outcast and a prostitute. When the town rejects such an offer at the expense of a much esteemed citizen, Claire does not argue; she can afford, she announces, to wait...
...waits, and when Schill worries, people tell him it comes from his own sense of guilt. But he sees the whole town buying wildly, on credit; and when he tries to run away, he finds an obstructive wall of townspeople at the railway station. In the clutch of material self-interest, the town goes in for moral self-deception, until at a public meeting Schill is condemned to death. With a billion-mark check for his killers, and with Schill's coffin borne before her, Claire goes away...
...will have a woodsy, almost idyllic reunion with her betrayer. The play's harsh power lies in just such incongruity, in its consistent theatricality, in its mingling of batlike symbolic figures with small-town burghers and clods, in what it graphically evokes but never exactly defines. Is it Schill, for example, that the townspeople finally kill, or is it their consciences...
...monstrous Lady Bountiful, Lynn Fontanne plays with a wonderfully enameled hardness, a high-styled fiendish poise. Playing Schill in a quite different style, Alfred Lunt gives a vividly realistic picture of human fright faced with the inhumanly frightening...