Word: stag
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...King Stag, written in 1762 by Carlo Gozzi in revolt against the realistic naturalism of contemporary theater, is a feast of the imagination with the technique and logic of the commedia dell'arte, Italy's native improvisational comedy. The third Gozzi production directed this year by Andrei Serban. The King Stag is a fairy tale set in the oriental kingdom of Serendippo where the good king Deramo is looking in vain for a worthy wife. His trusted but treacherous minister. Tartaglia, tries to insinuate his own daughter, Clarice, into the king's affections to distract the king from the beautiful...
...nonsense, but the "Gozzi Surprise," despite the comical efforts of Ben Haley's sorceress and Rodney Hudson's monstrous cook with a 10-foot, lethal ladle, never gets off the ground. Its absurdity remains strangely humorless and merely casts in greater relief the splendour and sublimity of The King Stag...
Everything about The King Stag is enchanting. The Forest of Miracoli, where Deramo goes hunting with Tartaglia, is filled with parrots whose gorgeous plummage creates a fluttering rainbow swirling in the air. Clever back-lighting on a pale skrim projects a prancing menagerie of lions and tigers and bears. A poor of light, lit from below the stage, suggests a woodland stream around which the overhead-lighting throws a sun-dappled forest floor. The fragile nobility of the two stags, with their breathtakingly lovely coats of the palest pastel, steal the forest show...
...Some, like Tartaglia's shimmering, black, bat-winged cape, are sumptuous and frightening. Truffaldino, the simple-minded bird catcher, on the other hand, looks hilariously like Big Bird with a truffle-shaped head. The characters' exotic masks, with their fixed and staring eyes, give even the humans in King Stag an entrancing and surreal beauty. When the characters speak from bodies not their own, as when Tartaglia inhabits Deramo's body to deceive Angela or when Deramo assumes the shape of a ghastly, emaciated, old man, their disembodied voices are piped in, as though from another world. The actors, after...
Like any great fairy tale, The King Stag includes not only sweetness and beauty but suffering and evil as well; the texture of daily life exaggerated in imagination. And for all the bewitching "superficiality" of the beautiful, masked characters, the play champions the spititual truth which magic and appearances sometimes hide; the beauty of Deramo's soul that shines even from within the grotesque, old man, and the ugliness of Tartaglia's soul that even Deramo's majestic form cannot conceal from the heart of Angela...