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Nonetheless, FBI Director William Webster dispatched 20 agents to Fort Wayne to investigate whether there had been a conspiracy to violate Jordan's civil rights. This was a device that enabled the FBI to investigate the case-the agency has jurisdiction only when federal laws are violated-but apparently it was misinterpreted by Carter as evidence that the shooting was an attempted assassination. Webster cautiously called Carter's use of the word a "possibly acceptable interpretation of the available facts." But another FBI official had a blunter reaction to the President's statement. Said he: "Premature...
...country home of the Tarleton clan seems demolition-proof. John Tarleton (Sandy Webster), self-made head of Tarleton's Underwear, is a man of irrepressible élan vital to whom skeptic thought is the champagne of the mind...
This is an uneven production. The high spot is Webster's Tarleton, a figure of dynamic animal magnetism and a dauntless fox hunter of ideas. Drawn to the aviator, Kipp's Hypatia is more coquette than carnivore in her pursuit.While the clever flow of the Shavian line defies damming. Director Christopher Newton permits intellectual comedy to be diverted into farce. No matter how funny Shaw may be, his truest punch line is moral passion. - T.E.K
MALFI DOESN't EXIST in this production of The Duchess of Malfi. The turgid program note warns that Webster's seventeenth-century tragedy is a "waking dream." An empty lavender platform represents the ducal palace of Malfi; in Laura Shiels and Cynthia Raymond's stylized production, this psychological drama could take place anywhere or anytime within one's imagination. Shiels and Raymond interpolate dance and mime into the story to indicate the tensions beneath the Renaissance rhetoric. A veil hangs at the back of the stage, behind which a "Duchess of Imagination" flirts while the real Duchess in front disclaims...
...only performance approaching credibility. By removing The Duchess of Malfi from a gossip-ridden palace and situating it in the dark recesses of the mind, Shiels and Raymond have made the tragedy more ghastly, the villains more sinister, but both less convincing. The directors have reduced Webster's tragedy to melodrama--enjoyable, fast-paced but cardboard. A tragedy should make us suffer vicariously, if only for an instant. We don't suffer for an instant at Quincy House's Duchess of Malfi: it's difficult to sympathize with someone else's nightmare...