Word: slapsticking
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...SLAPSTICK JUST DOESN'T WORK unless it's performed by people who can make you believe they are in continuous conflict with the physical world--anti-ballerinas, losing the battle to gravity. It's monstrously difficult to pull off, and hardly worth the trouble for all but the most natural clowns. No one in The Three Cuckolds betrays any flair for knockabout comedy, so it's hard to understand why the director. Michael S. E. Kaplan, chose to haul out this tedious commedia del l'arte piece and stage it, of all places, on the Loeb Mainstage, which swallows...
Commedia del l'arte is renowned for its blend of spontaneity and old hat--stock characters, stock situations, stock slapstick bits continually reshaped according to the whims of its experienced performers and the peculiarities of the audience and the space. At the beginning of this production, when the actors lug in part of the set, throwing out lines like. "Anybody I know out there?" and "Small house tonight," they establish a quick and funny rapport with the audience. Then the "ad-libs" cease and the show sobers up. Great--sober commedia del l'arte by inexperienced actors on the Loeb...
Kaplan has made a game stab at filling the space. He had meticulously choreographed a procession of clever unsurprising slapstick turns, solemnly executed by actors who signal the coming of a collision, pratfall or somersault the way a five-year-old holds his nose before diving off a high board. Rather than using the company's limitations and giving us a slopping, ingratiating evening, the director offers us a museum piece--slapstick embalmed...
...viewer is likely to smile along too, until Woman invades Cheech and Chong territory for stock comic complications and a slapstick climax. By film's end, the viewer's hopes have shrunk along with wee Lily. The razzle-dazzle finale - and a barrage of TV commercials and guest appearances by Tomlin and Co-Star Charles Grodin - may be working...
Censorship can, and often does, lead into absurdity, though not often slapstick absurdity like the New Jersey legislature achieved in the 1960s when it enacted a subsequently vetoed antiobscenity bill so explicit that it was deemed too dirty to be read in the legislative chambers without clearing out the public first. The mother in Whiteville, N.C., who demanded that the Columbus County library keep adult books out of the hands of children later discovered that her own daughter had thereby been made ineligible to check out the Bible. One group, a Florida organization called Save Our Children, has simplified...