Word: staging
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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WHAT'S HOT in theater, you ask? The monologue, duuuude, the dramatic monologue. If more than three people happen to gather near a stage, quicker than you can say "To be or not to be" some joker will pull up a chair and mike to rave on about his failed love affairs. What's more, these thespian monomaniacs are starting to break out of the Off-off Broadway ratholes they call home, colonizing the fair lands of film and legitimate theater. Whoopi Goldberg, Ann Magnuson, and Spalding Gray have all made the big break into films, the latter with...
Perhaps that is why Ben Evett '86, a charter member of Robert Brustein's Institute for Advanced Theatrical Training, has decided to stage Faith Healer in the Adams House basement. This two hour talkfest consists of four reminiscences about Francis Hardy (Ben Evett), an itinerant Irish faith healer whose ministrations actually succeed from time to time. Hardy, his wife Grace (Rebecca Clark), and his manager Teddy (Linus Gelber) recall his life, culminating in a disastrous return tour to Ireland. Each character gives his version of the events, with Hardy going first and last; like the famous Japanese short story...
...stage effects are harder to bring off for modern audiences than a manifestation of the supernatural. Try as directors may for some Freudian hallucinatory explanation of Macbeth, for example, the story makes little sense unless the witches are actual witches. This doesn't mean the supernatural must be portrayed as exotic: the most chilling thing about those women might be their normality, as if they were plump, middle-aged matrons nattering across a backyard fence about their ability to conjure spirits. That very perception of character seems to have guided Geraldine Page in a less malevolent but equally necromantic role...
...absorbed frump who just happens to be a medium with the gift of raising the dead. Her manner is so much the grasping fraud that the audience is stunned when she delivers the goods. Indeed, she is stunned herself: there are few funnier sights than Page striding across the stage in pursuit of a ghost whose presence she senses but cannot see, snuffling at the wraith's ectoplasm like a spaniel who just knows a squirrel is somewhere nearby...
...controversial bill aimed at stripping the church of control of much of its property. At stake are 325,000 acres of farmland that the government wants for state-run collective farms. While church leaders have vowed to fight the legislation in the courts if necessary, some observers say the stage is now set for a second round of bargaining that could end in a face-saving compromise acceptable to both sides...