Word: weiner
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Director Scott Weiner has developed successfully the psyches of his main characters. We get a sense that despite the tortuous screams and yells that pass between Mel and Edna, they truly love and respect each other. Weiner's effort comes, however, at the expense of the staging and the more technical matters of the play. He confines the actors to small areas of the stage. Simon claims there is no breathing space in the entire city; Weiner's direction drives the point home with claustrophobic regularity...
...Worse, Weiner's direction is often bland and static. He sidesteps many potential moments of comedic action. This is nowhere more apparent than in the family scene of Act Two; there is virtually no movement. Visiting Mel's apartment for the first time in nine years, his overbearing sisters do not even give it a cursory examination...
There are also major problems with the tone of this scene. After a finely controlled, realistic first act, Weiner miscalculates and guides the supporting actors into buffoonish caricatures. The actresses attempting Mel's sisters show no subtlety and more annoying, don't seem to believe in their characters as real people. Even their costumes are cartoonish and inappropriate. As Mel's constrained brother Harry, Jamie Orenstein aims at a fuller characterization, but remains rather wooden...
...WEINER INSISTS on adding music at the end of each act, merely cheapening the moments instead of enhancing them. Simon's comedy is often more effective when it is subtle. Neither does the production get any help from Paul Eldrenkamp's set. More reminiscent of Arthur Miller's Brooklyn than of a Bloomie's-decorated Upper East Side apartment, it demands more money or more imagination...
...over the one-sided nature of the publicity. Though WOASH leaked his name to the press, none of his supposed victims has been identified. Said he: "I'm terrified." But WOASH does not believe Hermassi has suffered enough. "The suspension is a piddling result, an outrage," says Merle Weiner, 27, a sociology graduate student who is a leader of WOASH. The organization vows to re-open the fight if the professor returns to Berkeley and seeks tenure next fall...