Word: texts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...same time the script is not paced as well as one would wish. There are patches of water-treading and even stasis alternating with patches of too-frantic activity. The play thus produces not only shudders and laughs but also occasional yawns. Still, the new text is fully as entertaining as the old. For some reason, though, the producers are advertising this show as having "an all-star Broadway cast." If words still have any meaning at all, this has got to be the hyperbole of the season...
...Garry Wills, usually lies not in Jefferson but in the anachronistic way that Americans have understood him and his greatest work, the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration, argues Wills, "is written in the lost language of the Enlightenment." It has passed through 202 years embalmed and misinterpreted, a sacred text enshrined in an ark of incomprehension. "The best way to honor the spirit of Jefferson," begins the historian, "is to use his doubting intelligence again on his own text...
...teacher of playwriting, the author has not fashioned a very good drama. She aims high and has tried to grapple with serious matters, but the writing is diffuse and the characterization thin. Moreover, the pacing is jerky; there is just too much stop-and-go. This is in the text itself, and should not be blamed on the director, Marshall W. Mason, who has done his best...
...bare recital, this scants the joy and tenderness which British Playwright Edward Bond's adaptation squeezes from Wedekind's text, and Ciulei's gift for mocking that hollow army of unalterable law made up of parents and teachers...
Philip Minor is less lavish with music than Freedman, and less self-indulgent in overall pacing. Although Minor commendably retains more of the text, his show is still a good twenty minutes shorter than the Stratford one. He has not, unfortunately, assembled a cast that is as skilled in classical diction as Freedman's players...