Word: shaktman
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...achieve it, director Ben Shaktman and his colleagues turned to Eugene O'Neill, our greatest American dramatist, and revived his simple but powerful psychological study of a Negro's fear and fall from power, The Emperor Jones--but with a difference. The usual scenery and iterated tom-tom beatings have been replaced by a dozen ballet dancers and and extended orchestral score. The 1920 play was "experimental" to begin with, and O'Neill would certainly have approved the result of this further experimentation...
...ending of The Lesson contains one of the great stage directions of all time: The professor "finds a big knife, invisible or real according to the preference of the director." Director Bernard Shaktman took the invisible knife, but that still did not justify the professor's leaning...
...Shaktman did a number of things to Jack. Perhaps the most important of these was to change the setting from a dingy room to a circus. The atmosphere of pure glitter and no meaning could not have fitted the situation better. The family of a clown strive first to make him admit to a love of hashed potatoes, and then to get married. This apparently signifies acceding to the ordinary world. Mr. Langella was excellent as Jack and Dorothy Gurvitz was outstanding as his sister. Karla Feinzig as the girl he is to marry was beautiful, but not terribly good...
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