Word: verbalizations
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...traditional mime routines. Martin, the grand master of the art form in America, is the featured performer during this first act. He's just a joy to behold. The second part, "Unnatural Acts," is an original theater piece that dispenses with mime tradition--a lot of the humor is verbal rather than physical--and is uneven in execution. "Unnatural Acts" has its moments though; an impression of cute little Shirley Temple singing a cute little "On the Good Ship Lollipop" is supposed to by hysterical--almost as funny as Ms. Temple's politics. The performance costs...
...that, it is an hour of funny, raucous burlesque. The four performers, Benson, Driscoll, DruMarkle and Peter Kovner, race hysterically around the stage in baggy, decorated long johns. The skits are shorter and faster paced than the ones in Beyond Words, and the humor here is largely verbal. The performers in the second half of the show seem possessed by a manic energy and a keen sense of the absurdity potential in any situation. The high point of the entire performance is Markle's brilliant parody of Shirley Temple singing "On the Good Ship Lollipop...
...Sybil--two cretin-like characters representing the very best in English shallowness. There is no further development of plot after act one, there is no major physical action beyond a brief lover's fight in the second. The director and the actors must build all the visual and verbal humor upon the nearly barren skeleton of the script and, at each performance, the actors must keenly tune the pace and style to suit the particular audience in order to thwart that "first sinister cough of boredom," as Sir Noel so aptly put it. At the Tufts Arena Theater, on Friday...
Arnott, in order to squeeze the maximum wit out of Coward's insipid manuscript, has worked out what appears to be a second-by-second computer program for verbal inflections, facial contortions, physical maneuvers, and furniture kicking. During the extensive arguments and love bouts of Elyot and Amanda, the play's spirited and engaging cynics, the precise sense of timing turns insults, cigarette lighting, and record smashing into high comic art. At times, Arnott's exhaustive direction and his actors' slavish execution reaches self-parody: it is worthwhile, during the course of the play, to study carefully the director...
...actor." Hutson and Lewis, as Elyot and Amanda, are a sharp, strong, and attractive duo who avoid most of Coward's worst pitfalls--abysmal dialogue, kitschy scenes, and trite psychology--and maximize Coward's well hidden strengths--the parody of English manners and social institutions, the art of verbal thrust and counterthrust, the sharp criticism of women's roles in society. Consider a typical Coward "life-line": "If there's one thing in the world that infuriates me, it's sheer wanton stubbornness. I should like to cut off your head with a meat axe." Without Jan Lewis's acid...