Word: schmurz
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...neatly symbolic -which fill them with dread. As the play progresses, The Sound drives the increasingly unsettled father into even smaller and poorer apartments. The members of the menage disappear one by one, until he is left alone with his battered, tacit adversary, known (in the program) as The Schmurz. What is The Schmurz-the awful awareness of one's own death? Is despair The Sound that drives this man into an ever-narrowing corner, where he babbles of flowers on his windowsill and dons his old uniform to fight he knows not what...
George Hamlin makes the father of the family lively and sympathetic in this Harvard production. Nancy Cox is a prattling wife and mother, Mary Moss a disgruntled daughter, and James Shuman slides and glides through the evening as the dumb schmurz. On all counts, this is one of the most interesting and satisfying productions the Harvard Dramatic Club has done in the last 15 years...
...mysterious, silent schmurz expires before the man does. But before the curtain falls, four others like him are crawling like rubber-suited crocodiles, silent and ominous, into the room. And what that may mean is anyone's guess...
...third and final act, there is no one left but the father--and the schmurz, still silent but now beginning to make contact: moving packages which the man has brought upstairs to this his ultimate retreat, yet still dumb, still quietly menacing...
...faces looming extinction, much of the action and many of the lines of "The Empire Builders" are foolish but amusing: foolish as the father tells long-winded stories, or acts out some of his memories of the past; or prattles with a foolish neighbor, meanwhile kicking the schmurz from time to time...