Word: wilder
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...respect, Kahn has made a fascinating departure from Wilder's script. I refer to the matter of sound effects, where the director has out-Wildered Wilder--and I bet the playwright would applaud. While there are many things that Wilder does not want us to see, he does want us to hear them. Some of these are distant--like a whistling train, a factory work-whistle, and chirping crickets on a moonlit night. Others, however, are on-stage things that are wholly imaginary--like the milkman's horse and his clanking bottles, and Mr. Webb's lawnmower...
...cast of players who portray a sizeable sample of the 2642 inhabitants of Grover's Corners touchingly and devotedly serve the script that Wilder said was "an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life." The characters all talk pretty much the same way, but Wilder could not have fashioned their colloquial speech without a keen ear and much hard work...
...Stage Manager of Fred Gwynne, who, under Kahn's guidance, maintains just the right pacing, and captures the proper folksiness. He is not afraid of pauses, whether to light his pipe or to contemplate what he wants to say next. In a couple of places he changes Wilder's words, updating a reference to "the treaty of Versailles and the Lindbergh flight" to "atom bombs and Apollo flights...
...winning way of putting over his occasional aphorisms, such as. "Wherever you come near the human race, there's layers and layers of nonsense." Or the notion put forth in a couple of passages near the start of Shaw's book-length preface to Misalliance, which Wilder, having the Stage Manager attribute it to "one of those European fellas," distills into an epigram. "Every child born into the world is nature's attempt to make a perfect human being...
...handling of the drugstore scene, in which Emily is ill-at-ease and nervously kneads her fingers. It is to the demands of the final act that she does not fully rise. This is the rainy cemetery scene in which the dead articulate their thoughts (an idea Wilder got from the early cantos of Dante's Purgatorio) and Emily returns from the dead to relive her twelfth birthday (a device Wilder had already tried in his novel The Woman of Andros). Here Miss Mulgrew fails to evince the intensity and luminosity that better actresses have managed to summon...