Word: webster
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
While the students' record remains unstained, the Faculty has one much-publicized ledger, the infamous Webster-Park-man murder case of a century...
Sunday morning John White Webster, Professor of Chemistry and Mineralology at Harvard, appeared at the Parkman identified himself as the visitor who had stopped by Friday morning to remind Parkman of his appointment. The engagement had been kept; Webster said he had paid the good doctor $483.64 for a mortgage Parkman had on his mineral collection. "I told Dr. Parkman," he said, "that he hadn't discharged the mortgage; to which he replied, 'I will see to that. I will see to that.' He then went very rapidly from the room...
...Jean Weston's Vittoria, and she rode it majestically. Her fury was never shouted, but came through instead as the disciplined, brittle, half-smiling anger of a real devil. Peter Haskell, though, prevented her from stealing the show. His unconventional Flamineo, more a pimp than a conspirator, lightened Webster's heavy psychologizing. As a commentator he clarified the story; as a murderer, he mad the killer's impulse seem explicable; and even when the action reached its bloodiest, he sustained its dramatic plausibility...
...Webster found evil more dramatically attractive than good, and his sympathetic characters are hard to play. But Beatrice Paipert (Vittoria's mother) and Bruce Heck (Francisco de Medici) speed those scenes when neither Weston nor Haskell are on stage, expressing their lines and feelings with such specificity that one doesn't long for the protagonists' re-entrance. Tom Griffin draws Marcello's decency well, another bright contrast to the diabolical setting...
When Vittoria and Flamineo are on stage, you hope that Webster will forget how to write an exit line. Particularly in their syncopated death scene, murder is shown to be a business which impoverishes all its entrepreneurs...