Word: slapstickers
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COOPERSTOWN, N.Y., Playhouse. Luv, by Murray Schisgal, talks Freud and carries a slapstick, Sept...
...original was a cockeyed but unerringly apt satire of people who make Freud their only poet, whose love talk is all about adjustment, alienation, angst and other pop-psychological cant. But this deft parody has given way to the adolescent vulgarisms of Scriptwriter Elliott Baker, who plots slapstick sequences in a department store and a Japanese restaurant that would be tasteless in a Jerry Lewis movie...
...scene is from a 1929 two-reeler starring, as the salesmen, those two heroes of the harebrained, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. To the uninitiated, the mayhem may seem just a grand exercise in slam-bang slapstick. But to a fan club called the Sons of the Desert, it is a classic example of the high comedic art of "reciprocal destruction" and worthy of scrutiny down to the last double take. Described as "an organization with scholarly overtones and heavily social undertones," the Sons of the Desert (named after an L. & H. film) was founded two years...
...current crop, though, does manage to bring to the Pyramus interlude a good deal of humor, albeit of a highly slapstick sort. Pyramus' whacking of Wall (Robert Frink) on the chest elicits a cloud of plaster dust. And when Thisby (Mylo Quam) says, "Come, trusty sword," she repeats the line, whereupon the "dead" Pyramus hands her his own sword, with which she then proceeds to stab herself with studied phoniness under the armpit. (Ritchard has, in fact, introduced throughout the whole show a lot of business straight out of vaudeville and the music-hall...
...Miss DeMott was confused. Their scenes together were dulcet and graced with a compelling sincerity. Both were good on stage, and at times Miss Hawkins managed an intensity of voice and expression which lifted her performance out of the production. Had the rest of the play been done slapstick, they could not have had their poety. But what tedium while we wait for them to enter...