Word: stagings
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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LOVE IS a plaintive song, and its object in Patience is the aesthete. A band of smitten maidens troops around the stage, fluttering their arms, striking desolate poses and sighing for one Reginald Bunthorne: poet and poseurpar excellence. Bunthorne's dedication, you see, is not so much to his art as to himself. His aestheticism, which issues in a poetry devoted to colocynth and calomel, is mere affectation, a ploy designed to elicit the admiration of his gullible Victorian public...
...fleshly man who merely feigns ethereality, Reginald is the butt of most of Gilbert's jokes, and as the frustrated lover of the simple maiden Patience, he gets to sing many of his funniest lyrics. Jackel is far from incompetent: he has a loud, if not operatic, voice, ample stage presence and a talent for looking discomfited...
Reginald's antics appear strained largely in contrast to the effortlessness which seems to mark Seltzer's characterization of Reginald's rival in love, the more spiritual Archibald. When he glides on stage to declare his affections for Patience, his infanthood sweetheart, Seltzer makes us keenly aware of what most of the other actors have been doing wrong. With a remarkable economy of movement and gesture, he skillfully conveys the fundamental absurdity of Archibald's unhappy narcissism, evoking laughs simply by a raised eyebrow or changed inflection...
Behind bars, Thoreau has the chance to reflect on his life and its direction. He retreads the path that led to Walden Pond and which will now lead away from it. These remembrances are acted out on stage giving the audience insight into the way Thoreau's mind works and the moral dilemmas he faces. Dilemmas which have remarkable bearing on society today, or more accurately, society in the United States in the days of Vietnam. Even the most hard-boiled viewer will fidget when Thoreau looks through his imaginary bars and says, "How do you know...
...kinetic, hyper-active, easily excited individual who bellowed at the top of his lungs at the drop of a hat and treated every other word he uttered as though it was destined to be chiseled in granite. Perhaps Landiss and Pullum have captured the essence of the man on stage, I don't know. But a calmer, more subtle, more contemplative characterization would probably be more effective in portraying the gentle man who could live by himself for nearly two years on the bank of a New England pond...