Word: schizoid
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There is no doubt that this sensual, mythical poem-play is extremely challenging not only by virtue of its grand themes but also because of its schizoid scenes and violent characters. Baal is the name of a fertility god, but this play, full of images of rotting food and flesh, charts the progression of an over-ripe and destructive appetite. The bohemian poet, Baal (Daniel Sussner '00), is an enormously charismatic man who desires to eat, fuck, experience and be everything, ultimately even death itself. He is forever yearning for the infinite "purple sky" and the "dark river...
There developed, then, a kind of schizoid world in which I sought to explain how and why research was in two different areas. Concepts, like time, won over: the indistinction of things legible and visible in both film and early modern writing. The book as a creation of what Walter Ong called the "local motion" of printed characters. Cinema as an operation that analyzes culture differentially because it establishes multiple "tracks" and thus complicates deixis in ways familiar to medieval authors. Cartographic writing and the relation of space on early maps to literary and political artifacts...
...that he can play Taper/Trigorin with deadpan nonchalance. Christopher Liam Moore, on the other hand, makes little distinction at all between Cam/Konstantin and Simon/Medviedenko. As with other aspects of the play, enormous promise, here in the form of fine acting, is ultimately undermined by taking dramatic conceits like these schizoid duos...
Unfortunately, the other three performances do not match the caliber of these two and serve to weigh down and drag out the play. Ryan McCarthy's portrayal of Mark, the strung-out schizoid 'Nam vet, is so one-note that the revelation that he participated in a fragging incident, which should have been the climax of McCarthy's portrayal, gets lost in all the raving. Danielle Sherrod, as Carla, a flamboyant would-be sex goddess, is engaging and humorous at first. But her portrayal, too, is so intense as to lack dynamic, and her story, though flecked with comic moments...
...schizoid staging reflects director Howard Davies' determination to do something new vs. the insistence of the estate of librettist-lyricist Alan Jay Lerner on replicating the 1956 staging. Most impiously, Davies hints that Eliza leaves Higgins forever, as in Shaw's Pygmalion. That idea fights the musical's text and, indeed, its boy-meets-girl form. The text and form win the brawl. But nothing in this show is close to a knockout...