Word: speiser
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Born in London in 1933, the only child of a painter named Eleanore Lock-speiser, Mary Frank came to New York during World War II. At 17, she married the photographer Robert Frank. Although she had no formal training as a sculptor, she did study drawing in Manhattan during the '50s under Hans Hofmann, the doyen of abstract expressionist teachers. More important for her work, however, was a stint as a dance student with Martha Graham: the sense of significant gesture in Graham's choreography does seem to have affected the movement of Frank's own sculptures. The best...
Because of severe space limitations, Willy Forbath's review of "The World of Lenny Bruce" did not mention some essential details when it appeared last Friday. The play, which was directed by Frank Speiser and has Speiser as its star, is showing at the Players Theater in New York City...
...Even Speiser's hilarious Brucean renderings of a man waking up with an erection and spraying the bathroom walls as he relieves himself and of a groom overwhelmed and reeling at the left-over odor of his own Caelia don't jolt the way they used to. In Bruce's mind the fear of arrest and exposure had mingled with excretory fantasies and the irrational guilt of old-fashioned Jewish toilet training with its terrifying threats--"He made kaka? All right, we'll get a policeman!" So you have to alert your "liberated" psyche against this sense of easy enjoyment...
...Speiser's portrayal of Lenny at his last obscenity trial in New York in '65 is devastating. Haggard, hounded and profoundly paranoid, he speaks first to an imaginary listener outside the courtroom and then to the judge. Speiser has gleaned and woven together from Bruce's last performances an account in Bruce's own words of his 19 busts. In Chicago a foolish bigoted judge puts on a show for the electorate. It's Ash Wednesday and the jurors he addresses all sport ashened foreheads. "It was like the goddammed Spanish Inquisition." The plain clothesmen who are sent...
...Speiser is far more convincing at recreating Lenny than he is at eulogizing him. In one of his three narrative interludes Speiser re-iterates Bruce's own false account of his drug habit. The strangely obsequious, incoherent and law-obsessed Lenny Speiser portrays before the judge is gripping and accurate. But the New Left hero and spokesman whom he eulogizes in closing never lived...