Word: underworldly
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Enter Laurence Senelick as Reb Azrielke. For the remaining two acts he commands the stage, judging the rightness of the dybbuk's claims, then bringing the powers of the underworld against him. Senelick is by turns pitious and imperious, awful in the robes of his rabbinical office, then faint in the arms of a friend. His lines are difficult, full of the persistent legalisms that could have reduced tragedy to laughable pontification. Set against the virtuosity of his performance is the disembodied voice of the dybbuk, sounding all the more despairing and alone in its electronic chill. There, away from...
There are other fears, too, perhaps less rational. The University, at least one dean believes, could be completely overrun by drugs. Everyone would be using them. Everyone would be stoned all the time, floating around with no responsibilities and no obligations. Or the gangster underworld (which is commonly thought to be the source of most marijuana) could gain a foothold in the University through student (and perhaps faculty) pushers. All these fears are very real to the men who make the rules and enforce them here...
...gets chased off the streets by the very people he is trying to help. All three become ruinously involved with a right-wing tycoon who controls several top city officials and now wants to lead a cryptofascist "moral" crusade. Stone's theme is the inextricable grip of the underworld on its inhabitants; he draws a sure-handed diagram of brutal power and its victims...
...Peter Adams, agreed to take the island back into the federation, but his constituents balked and deposed him. Webster insists that he has the guns and money to go it alone. And the West Indies are alive with rumors that he is being besieged with offers of help from underworld types anxious to establish a gambling haven, land developers, and a Greek shipping magnate eager to fly the Anguillan flag (two mermaids holding a seashell, a spear and an olive leaf) as a cost-cutting flag of convenience. Evidence to back up the rumors is as elusive...
Babe backs up Deitch and Adagala with an engaging ensemble. Patricia Hawkins is Garga's selfish, brightly brainless wife. Jim Shuman, Anthony Mowbray, and Lloyd Schwartz as Skinny, the Baboon and the Worm respectively are a trio of underworld figures who are funny yet always potentially dangerous. And I. M. Lamb as Garga's father is the most amazingly impotent old man ever to live off his children...