Word: senelick
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...cast, finding itself with shallow, mechanical parts, has retaliated by only going through the motions. Even Laurence Senelick's lines, which he lets go with a luscoius roll, somehow land with a clunk. Bea Paipert makes a very funny cow of an old lady, Kathryn Walker gives a droll, nasal performance of a declining aristocrat, and Tom Jones is perfect as a timid schoolteacher. But Director George Hamlin's overall pace is funeral, and most of the performances lack snap. The audience, however, seemed to enjoy the same mechanical trick of "getting sick" five or six times...
...principals hardly do the lines justice, but many of the secondaries do. Lawrence Senelick has studied his Pistols and Shallows until he has assembled the whole bag of Shakespearean character tricks, and he executes them perfectly. John Lithgow makes an engaging brother to Tom Jones, who carries off the villain's part with great authority. And Sheila Hart, if she would sharpen her diction a bit, would make a perfect world-weary mother...
...Laurence Senelick's directing captured the play's tone and succeeded in making this light black comedy touching as well as funny. The sparingly used shock effects and sight gags, the sharp blocking, the distinct footwork which marks each character, the special lighting for climactic moments, combined to give the show a stagey, super-charged quality. The cast included two of the best character actors in Cambridge, Marilyn Pitzele and Senelick himself. They cleverly made their characters a little larger than life, a little histrionic, rather than strictly realistic...
...Senelick himself succeeded in playing a septeginarian by chucking the canon of conventional old-man tricks and reinforcing his performance with large doses of pathos, building up a resistance in his audience so that he could administer the biggest dose of all in his death scene. He stunned the house by weaving, choking, and spitting out a farewell mouthful of blood...
...Senelick's translation from the French is unspeakably good. He has wisely used current Americanisms to give the language the proper effervescense and irreverance. To render the play in early twentieth century American would have been a gray business: nothing is as dead as dead slang. Senelick's greatest triumph is his version of a Spaniard (Daniel Deitch) speaking English. Gerund endings are assiduously dropped where they should be; b's and v's are assaulted with appropriate force...