Word: teresas
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...play about what can happen to people who answer Real Paper classifieds. A young student in Rome named Elena responds to an ad offering free room and board in return for companionship. As a result, she is forced to listen to the long neurotic monologues of her host, Teresa; falls in love with Teresa's estranged husband, Lorenzo; and finally gets shot to death...
...first half of the play is practically a single speech an hour long. Teresa, very well played by Amy Moss, pours out the story of her life, sloppily, like soup overflowing a saucer--her nightmares, unhappy childhood, financial problems, and unrequited love for her husband. "Is all this boring you?" she asks Elena (Anne Singer)--a risky suggestion for an author to make to an audience when presenting this kind of familiar material. But Ginzburg carries it off, and instead of sounding like your roommate's version of hell at Harvard, the first act is hypnotic and convincing...
Like a radio drama heard in a dark room, the sound of Teresa's voice seems the most important thing in the world for a few moments. Loving, whining, and remembering everything, she is dramatically true and completely sympathetic. She absorbs life around her, pours it into the warped mold of her own experience, and then utters it forth again, transformed, without self-pity or egotism...
...turns out, Teresa is so convincing about the virtues of her husband that the moment Lorenzo (Henry Lie) shows up, Elena falls in love with him. Rich, pretentious, and dated, he drags Teresa down to his own level of platitudes and the play begins to sound inane. ("She's as boring as a bottle of olive oil." "I didn't know olive oil was boring.") Things begin to happen fast, but the play goes off balance once the static, dreamy atmosphere of the first act is left behind. The rest of the play ignores the social and sexual issues raised...
...Michael, a petty crook full of ambition but lacking Charlie's family connections. He mimics George Raft, and is sulky and dangerous when he thinks he's being crossed. Charlie appears to have some compassion for both, just as he appears to have some understanding of his girlfriend's (Teresa, the film's only unconvincing portrait) epilepsy. Associating with these people hurts Charlie's "career", because he has to stay in good with Uncle and the traditional ideal of "honorable men." On the surface, then, he stands out as heroic...