Word: stag
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...stronger seasons, the consistently superb sets have been the real standouts. Michael Yeargan, the set designer for the gorgeous King Stag, has created an elegant English courtyard, complete with gazebo and statuary, that Broadway would have had difficulty matching at twice the budget. It's a pity that the ART techies don't get their own curtain call for a season of amazing work; they deserve it more than a number of the actors who have appeared on their stages...
victories from Arkansas Rock and Wisconsin to stag fifth place...
...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...
...King Stag has a meaning too. It ends when the magician Duandarte, like Shakespeare's Prospero before him, lays down his magic wand and returns to life among men and natural phenomena--but not before saying that, finally, the best fantasies do not escape reality but return to it refreshed with the hope that the ordinary can be wonderful. And he is right. When you leave the Loeb, the streetlights--well, at least the stars--will seem to wink...