Word: senelick
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...LAURENCE SENELICK'S production of Women Beware Women is as fluid and incisive as the history of his work suggests it would be. One regrets only that the constraints of mortality made it impossible for Mr. Senelick to discuss his reading of the text with Thomas Middleton. For Mr. Middleton might thereby have been persuaded to eliminate or at least refine those premature bursts of anguish which mar the first act. Alternatively, Mr. Senelick might have been persuaded to abandon his brilliant championship of textually uneven plays on the grounds that world literature ought not be edited by graduate students...
...avoid this effect, and thus make the fall of the three all the more dramatic, Senelick is forced to mute the first act. Unfortunately Leantio, the merchant's clerk who loses his high-born bride on account of his stupid, Ben Franklin punctilliousness, has some of his best and most revealing lines in the opening moments: losing them destroys some of the irony so carefully worked into succeeding scenes. But as Kenny McBain went at the role rather gingerly throughout all of last night's performance, Leantio may be better served when he settles into the part...
Once the necessity of the youth's decline becomes known, Senelick asserts a masterly control. He counter-points the rapes and deceits which finally consume everyone on stage, (except perhaps the bourgeois Leantio, whose "breeding" makes life at court intolerable) with a rich display of period objects and customs. The two themes, the perversion of every code of conduct and the persistent and self-serving reverence for the code itself come together in the final scene: the principals all do one another in while the Duke of Florence, portrayed with a peculiar accent by Jonathan Raymond, complains that none...
Director Laurence Senelick, Harvard's no. 2 expert on Restoration drama, must be credited with giving his group a sound grounding in Restoration style, because during that segment they managed not only to act funnily within the flitty Restoration method, but also to satirize conventions of Restoration theatre and mores, even to the point of improvising gossip about how Lady Carlisle ate her turnip. And Shakespeare got his due, as one would expect, given a grave on a putting green. Ken Tigar, possibly the quickest witted of this quick crew, finally declaimed "come, my trusty nine iron" as he plunged...
...Senelick's general conception of course has weaknesses. It helplessly exposes poorly written roles, like that of Simeonov-Pischik, a rather pointless proverb-spouting neighbor played by Reggie Stuart, and Chekhov's occasional lapses of imagination. They can no longer hide behind the Slavic fog. But at the same time, the director's shaping of his Cherry Orchard makes the play funny, exciting, and intriguing as well as traditionally poignant. The play took just under three hours and you couldn't notice it, which even in the Moscow Art Theatre would be quite something...