Word: stage
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...scenery by Robert Randolph seems to have come straight out of the comic books. Metropolis's skyline is faultless. The Daily Planet, Clark Kent's apartment, City Hall, and scores of other familiar landmarks move effortlessly on and off the stage. Unfortunately, Superman himself is another matter. The wire he dangles from looks like a cable thick enough to hold the Queen Mary. And the illusion of flying is hardly enforced if you sit at the side and see Holiday waiting high up in the wings for each of his entrances...
...Staging a play within a play is a good way to get at the serious question of reality and illusion--provided the playwright is skillful. Dennison isn't. Instead of treating the device seriously or comically--as in Batman when a BLAM sign is flashed--he tries to do both at once and winds up with something that is laughable. There is, for example, an actor who "portrays" a train and at least four times walks across the stage carrying a framework that is suggestive of a train. Not to subtle...
There were some nice touches. Once, the two men in the audience get so excited that they jump up and begin cheering with the actors on stage; another time a wind machine and dimmed lights make the actors forget that they are only pretending, and they act as though they were in the middle of a real storm...
Spruill slithers across the stage, rubbing the boards with his arms and legs; when he roars his whole body heaves as though he was vomiting up sound. He is the man that the white dressed girl, Rosemary, corrupts; she coaxes him into committing incest with his sister...
Director David Wheeler creates the proper atmosphere of mysticism and terror with eerie noises, a dim stage, and a gilded idol. At times he over- does it--as when he lets the machinegun sounds that close the play and signal the death of Brother and Sister Rat go on and on. For the most part, though, he is in control...