Word: slapstickers
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...SELLARS has stroked a bold production of Antony and Cleopatra in the ghostly waters of Adams House Pool, with frigid temperatures and floating death cooling the flames of Shakespeare's most passionate tragedy. Not that it isn't lively--Sellars sustains the initial gimmick with scene after scene of slapstick splashing and general mayhem, but balances his off-the-wall antics with a sound sense of the appropriate; invention almost seems subordinate to the text. If it frequently resembles a circus, it is an indisputably Shakespearean circus, the Bard doing breast-stroke, the actors barnstorming with the kind of relish...
...been made aloud. No one, including the Piloboli themselves, could say exactly what it was that the troupe was doing when it began experimenting in 1971. It certainly was not dance, say the purists, meaning that it was not classical ballet or any recognizable modern dance. Was it acrobatic slapstick, abstract-expressionist mime, some kind of muscular, head-over-heels tableau vivant? The startling truth was that Pilobolus entangled human bodies in ways that no one had ever seen before. When the group performed on Broadway last year for four weeks of near sold-out performances, Critic Arlene Croce admitted...
...ugly stepsisters (David Drummond and Larry Robertson), cavorting with bovine vulgarity, the shrewish stepmother (Elaine Bauer), and Cinderella herself (Laura Young), a painfully angelic victim. We can't be expected to take these people seriously, and Cunningham doesn't either. Large chunks of the ballet are given over to slapstick--the stepsisters squabble tug-of-war fashion over a shawl, or trip over each other to greet the Prince (Woytek Lowski). The liveliest moments are high comedy having nothing to do with ballet, and the work becomes difficult to approach on any other level. The happily-ever-after final tableau...
...Camp focuses on the trivia of his characters' lives--quarrels, flirtations, games--that scratch the surface of more serious conflicts, mostly based on the black caddies' feelings about working in an all-white country club. Only the tips of these deeper issues appear, however; what dominates is verbal and slapstick wit. At the Boston Center for the Arts at the Ehrlich Theatre, 536 Tremont St. in Boston...
...fiction by Dr. Michael Halberstam '53, is an eminently likeable book. The story of A.L. Levine, millionaire Jewish politico, and his accidental campaign for the presidency of an America grown tired and fat and eager for a new face, is most of what any novel should be: funny, touching, slapstick across the surface but with a strong subtle current running along the seabed, a roaring good story with a moral that doesn't have to hit you across the head. Halberstam, who won the 1953 Dana Reed Prize in his days as managing editor of The Crimson, has certainly proven...