Word: shepards
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...golf balls hit by Alan Shepard...
...emotional territory of Simpatico, the most recent work by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Sam Shepard, is something familiar to Kellerman. His production last year of David Mamet's American Buffalo in the Loeb Ex explored the same realm of underworld deceit and betrayal, the same search for loyalty and friendship that marks this play. That is not to say Simpatico is a large scale retreading of the same dramatic ground Kellerman mapped so clearly last year. Sam Shepard is not David Mamet. He isn't able to maintain the same level of unshaking intensity that Mamet can create...
...when he's at his best, Shepard can pull tricks of which Mamet is incapable. His characters, unlike Mamet's tough-talkers, are willing to show their own vulnerability. They are desperate to do so in some cases. And this is where Kellerman's production shines. Kellerman has an eye for portraying human frailty, for capturing the looks and muffled breaths that mark us at our weakest moments. What is most amazing is that he can make these looks and breaths seem as powerful in the 500 seat mainstage theater as they did in the infinitely smaller...
...None of this would be possible, of course, without the remarkable cast of Simpatico. Shepard's play presents the aftermath of a 15-year-old case of blackmail, showing how both the blackmailers and the blackmailed must struggle to shape for themselves normal, fulfilling lives. At the center of the play is Carter, the mastermind of the nefarious scheme, played with passion and subtlety by David Modigliani '02. Carter is the only character to have profited from the blackmail scandal, but Modigliani is wise enough to show that his success and power are as much mental creations as they...
...there are many electric moments in the play. Set designer John Gordan '01 places Shepard's characters in what resembles a series of stacked prison cells, and it is in this segmented, sequestered reality--under the blinding, white lights of Matt Denman '00--that they must fight to find companionship and solace. The difficulty of coming together in such antiseptic enclosures makes the play's moments of human contact, or near contact, all the more heart-stopping. And it makes the play's final image, an image of ultimate loneliness, seem all the more sad for its inevitability...