Word: shepards
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...chronologically backward structure of the George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart 1934 play of the same title, Merrily begins with the commencement address to the Class of '80 at Lake Forest Academy. The school's most famous graduate, a hugely successful composer and film producer, Franklin Shepard (Jim Walton) prates of the need to compromise in order to get ahead. But when the musical ends, and Franklin is the valedictorian of 1955, he gives a ringing, idealistic peroration. In tracking back over the quarter-century, we watch this singularly unappealing hero being cruelly false to his wife...
...Crimson, composed mainly of underclassmen, sorely missed the leadership and full ability of its three injured seniors--captain Adam Dixon, Keck Shepard and Peter Johnson. The superlative Dixon, out since the second meet with an injured knee, did not even make the trip, and Shepard was prevented from running because of a serious groin pull. Johnson, a gutsy Eliot House resident, ran in the meet despite a sore ankle but finished near the end of the pack...
...small Texas town off the gulf. Nita Longley (Sissy Spacek), a divorced woman with two sons, works in an isolated house as the town's switchboard operator. She meets a fresh-faced sailor (handsomely played by Eric Roberts); there is a tender affair, another man (Sam Shepard), a pair of resentful layabouts, an abrupt slash of melodrama. Except for the denouement, Raggedy Man proceeds with the even pace of a journey over the Texas plains as seen through a child's wide eyes...
...film might have been made in the 1940s, when "regional" writers were charting new corners of the American subconscious and film makers like Frank Borzage and Clarence Brown were spring-cleaning old work clothes and folkways. If there is an intrusive touch of modernism, it comes from Shepard, the playwright whose Buried Child and The West tunnel into the dreams of the rural working class, and then explode them. As the haunted "raggedy man," Shepard lurks at the edges of the film's life, giving it texture and menace and meaning. But Spacek is the center. Until...
...behind even this layer that this play succeeds so well. Shepard's dialogue is almost inadvertent--it bubbles up from the turmoil below. He deals in images and almost primitive responses--screams, bodies, music, costumes and deceit. The music in this show, composed by Stephen Drury, is wonderful--unnerving and soothing, sometimes capricious and sometimes just a bit too out of control for comfort. In these silences Shepard does his best exploration--and into these silences this production does not attempt to read too much. These characters for the most part are shadows--inventive shadows (Pablo's and Louis...