Word: stageful
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Well-padded, playing a role Orson Welles would do without salary, Daniel Seltzer ambles grotesquely around the wooden rectangular stage on which most of Prince Erieis performed. He is Jim Fisk, fat man who rejected the potentially bleak future indicated by his past, becoming instead one of the richest, most unscrupulous Americans in the latter part of the 19th Century. Fisk and partner Jay Gould began with the Erie railroad and, at the height of their spectacular careers, virtually cornered and manipulated the country's private gold reserve...
Throughout the play, letters, money, and clothing are destroyed, thrown carelessly on the stage where pieces remain for the duration of an act, becoming part of Fisk's legacy. Fisk reacts to his first financial triumph by destroying his Jersey City hotel room. The scene is reminiscent of Charles Foster Kane destroying his wife's room when she leaves him. But in Welles's film, Kane's sole object is the furniture; in Prince Erie, the finite playing area itself cramps Fisk, and he becomes undisciplined energy trying, I suspect, to break the walls down, also Jersey City, anything that...
Prince Erie boasts some of the finest dialog heard on a stage in-recent years. Mayer's speeches combine formal rhythms and precise images with deliberately chosen colloquialisms and small mistakes in grammar, both creating characterization and recreating the formal journalistic idiom of the period. Reporting the market crash, the Heraldreporter ends his news story with, "Threats against Fisk are freely indulged in." Fisk's early employer Daniel Drew prays, "Deliver me from the House of the Harlot, Lord, and from the rest of this here lewd company who don't give two bits for Thy commandments...
...front of a black-and-white American flag, and it perfectly into the even pacing of the play. The most dazzling of Babe's devices concern the scene transitions, all of which are visibly effected by uniformed stagehands, and generally overlap with the action. Climactically, we watch the stage crew change a living room to an office while Fisk and an entire brass band march triumphantly around the stage...
...been stuffed from neck to calf and uses his enormous bulk convincingly to great advantage. He sways dangerously back and forth when faced by his dissatisfied mistress, breaks into an anguished trot to keep up with his evermoving lunatic father in the magnificent asylum scene, paws the stage instinctively like a bull, and is forever grabbing objects with intent to break or mangle, only to realize frustratedly that he has no reason to break them. "Your hands, Jim. Always your hands," says Josie resisting his brusque advances; sensing the importance of the line as a key to characterization, Seltzer styles...