Word: texts
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...recent months, much public debate in Cambridge' has centered around the City's "housing crisis," primarily about the shortage of housing for low-income families. Here is the text of a speech which City Manager James L. Sullivan delivered to a City Council hearing on housing last week...
...balance in the sets and in the play's structure, however, Shakespeare did not achieve balance in the quality of his text. An objective inspection of the script indicates that he seems not to have had his heart in the Claudio-Hero plot he borrowed from elsewhere. His chief achievement in the play are precisely those things he had to invent himself: the witty verbal skirmishing between Beatrice and Benedick, and the portrait of bureaucratic officialdom represented by the malapropistic Dogberry and his sorry crew. (Shaw is about the only person who has denied the wit of the high comedy...
...blue, be it said. I suppose all this is to emphasize the enormous odds facing the outnumbered British. When conversing with the British, the French speak English with a French accent. When the French talk among themselves, however, Kahn has provided them with a French translation of Shakespeare's text. While they spout French, a man and woman at the downstage extremities simultaneously speak the English version into microphones--as though broadcasting a United Nations caucus. This is utterly pointless, a good example of Kahn's gimmickry-for-the-sake-of-gimmickry. When Shakespeare wanted people inn his play...
Unwilling to trust the play, Kahn has cut the text liberally, transposed lines, distributed the one-man Chorus speeches among four persons, imported dialogue from the end of 2 Henry IV (delivered over loudspeakers), and added lines of his own by way of scene descriptions. And there is a steady parade of gimmicks and odd bits of business, borrowed from such sources as the plays of Brecht, Genet's The Balcony, and the Living Theatre's Mysteries and Smaller Pieces. Kahn is, like Autolycus in The Winter's Tale, a 'snapper-up of unconsidered trifles." He has seen...
Kahn then proceeds with his play. He has divided his text into twenty-one chunks. At the outset of each, one person strikes the claves and, in the manner of Brecht's "epic theatre," declaims a caption that purports to distill the ideological essence of the scene to follow. Thus we hear, for instance: "Scene 7: Siege of Harfleur; Propaganda of the Machine; The People Follow"; "Scene 11: Winter Continues; Discourses on War and Death; The Army Marches"; "Scene 15: Economic Lesson on the Battlefield"; "Scene 17: Exeter Tells the Lie of Noble Death...