Word: staging
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Golden Screw pretends to be innovative and exciting theater. The hero never speaks. He (occasionaly with other characters), merely sings in between dialogues which are directed at or about him, but in which he never participates. A one sided conversation is hard enough to pull off on stage. Given Sankey's trite dialogue, Alice Roach's direction, which is unobtrusive to the point of negligence, and M.I.T.'s incompetent actors, who tend to point their hands a lot and look bored on stage, the results was worse than a class play at P.S. 451--children are cute at least...
...songs of us folk, as hip Country and Western groups. Sure, folk music is often great and gutsy. But the simplistic Romantic anti-sellout sentiment it symbolizes in this play really equals the willful alienation of Sankey's hero, who speaks to no one, either in his stage world or in the audience world. An individual standing alone against evils can be beautiful, but the individual must have more to say than "fuck...
Belonging to that unhappy second category Paul Schmidt's production screws around a lot, and most of it is pretty second-rate. Shakespeare's vicious savage, often Websterian tragedy is, for God's sake, not the lightweight collection of ideas on this stage, and when the play does assume characteristics of the darkest and most destructive comedy (as the program notes fashionably term the entire play) in the last few scenes, Schmidt reverses the entire style of his own production to heavy and symbolic drama, groping I presume for an ending via sudden spurts of electronic music and taped dialogue...
Which is all fine and good, except Shakespeare wrote a supreme anti-climax. In the text (cut from this production) Troilus and his romantic replacement Diomedes fight one another across the stage three times, Shakespeare resorting to familiar mechanics prior to an important killing as he does in Macbeth and several of the history plays. But the killing never comes, they fight their way offstage, we never see them again, our expectations are brutally cheated. Instead, Hector (decidedly the wrong man at this point) gets killed with his pants down by Achilles, and the play ends with nothing resolved...
...characteristics early in the play keep projecting them and, as in the Loeb's Balcony, everyone is always clutching at one another to a degree dramatically unjustifiable even in a war story set among the Greeks and Trojans. And it's shame, because Schmidt blocks beautifully on the huge stage (several entrances and scene transitions are stunning) and it would have been nice to see him experiment with more sophisticated dramatic gesture...