Word: senelick
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Anything You Say Will Be Twisted, by British playwright Ken Campbell, is a perfect vehicle for the Senelick style. It is one of a long series of plays and novels, among them Gay's Beggar's Opera, derived from the life of Jack Sheppard, a young thief and ruffian of early 18-century London who became a folk hero through the British love of the scurrilous and inane. This particular version of the Sheppard legend has the hero start out as a relatively innocent carpenter's apprentice and slowly immerse himself in the ways of thievetry, lechery, and general debauchery...
Harpo's choices of plays for production are never haphazard. The choice of this play of Brecht's seems particularly sensitive. Harpo is committed to do plays as much the way they were written as possible. Director Laurence Senelick must then intend Drums in the Night primarily as a statement about Weimar Germany. I have no real way of knowing how well he succeeds. The play seems like what Weimar seems like, anomie everywhere, drunken revelry, heavy humor, recrimination and insecurity. Anna's super bourgeois parents, played by Martin Andrucki and Raye Bush, are convincing, and though they are without...
...AURENCE SENELICK'S direction keeps the cast busy. Everyone is always doing something, and some of the bits (Rheba scratching her head with a work while setting the table, Kolenkhov absently clipping threads from his cuffs with a cuticle scissors) are tremendously successful. The timing can have Marx Brothers accuracy (it can also be unbearably sluggish, something that the Harpo troupe might well improve during the summer Agassiz run). But the production is a 1title too cute, and some of the actors create dreadful characters that seem carved out of soap, so that finally the message of the play...
...Still, Senelick's attempt to demystify Ocdipus sometimes goes beyond honesty and emotional integrity to intellectual eccentricity, even perversity. After an actor has recounted in nauseating detail how Ocdipus has just gouged out his eyes, the chorus begins to laugh, and then say things like "There's good luck and bad luck," or "that's fate, hahaha." In the final scene, after Ocdipus has stumbled blindly across the stage out the door the cast does a copulation mime that features a man with an enormous dildo and a woman with pubic hair drawn on her leotard. It is like...
...forms Senelick has chosen to convey ritual are highly derivative: he has borrowed Oriental Kabuki gestures for Oedipus and locasta, and this works very well, stylizing their "act" of semi-divinity almost to satire. For the Chorus he has assimilated the chanting and stick-beating rhythms of the Open Theater, the serpentine body piles of the Living Theater, and the copulation mime of Marat/Sade. All are dramatically sound, but one is aware of their unoriginality...