Word: sergel
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Winesburg, Ohio (adapted by Christopher Sergel from the short stories of Sherwood Anderson) turns Anderson's celebrated slim volume into far too slim a play. The book's small-town vignettes shocked readers in 1919 with insights into the neurotic crochets of lonely, frustrated Winesburghers. No longer shocking, it has been smoothed by the years into a piece of rural nostalgia, but it is still a plotless set of fragments unified by little more than the author's tone of voice and a mood of isolated lives. For dramatic focus, Adapter Sergel forfeited the rich multiplicity...
...Willard Hotel that seems to imprison the audience as well as the players, this pallid version of Broadway's Look Homeward, Angel has just enough story line for a wistful, low-key one-act play. The line goes hopelessly slack in the second and third acts when Playwright Sergel keeps falling back on his first. Even the major Anderson characters seem thin, and for a good reason. Anderson merely sketched them with evocative daubs; his adapter failed to fill them out with the detail demanded by the theater. Out of misapplied reverence for the original, he painstakingly spliced pieces...
Christopher Sergel tried to do it, but except for a few character portraits, his play seems pale...
...Although Sergel adapts and cuts the book freely, he has not come up with much unity or much of a plot: George is encouraged to leave home by his mother and restrained by his father and by his love for a rather unappealing banker's daughter,and then, ironically,by the illness of his mother. When she finally dies, he is free to leave...
Besides these three, McCurdy had steady performers in French Anderson, Mike Liles, Ken D'Arey, Sergel Smegireff, and John Biggs...