Word: wilder
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...Alcoa Theater (NBC, 9:30-10 p.m.). Comedian Jack Carson, as a brash wildcatter, struggles with an even wilder urchin...
...heading for it all his life. He was reared in the giant shadow of his brother Huey-the Kingfish, a Louisiana legend as living tyrant and assassinated martyr. Earl Long hated his place in Huey's shade. To prove himself a better man, he merely proved himself a wilder one. In his role as a man of the people, he casually cleaned between his toes at press conferences. As a political fighter, he once sank his teeth into an opponent's throat. He billed himself as "Ole Earl," and. if he never became the national figure that Huey...
...might be argued," wrote Donald Malcolm, reviewing the Circle in the Square production, that Our Town is not a play at all, but a novel galvanized!" Taking over the function of a novel's omniscient narrator, Wilder's Stage Manager, the instrument by which he creates the largely invisible, but believable world of Grovers Corners, New Hampshire, must be impeccable in both manner and dialogue. Edward Finnegan, the Stage Manager in the Charles Players' production is all this and more, and most of the play's success can be attributed to his well-timed gestures of hat and pipe...
Feeling that the plays of his day "tried to capture verisimilitude, not reality," Wilder set out to write plays that would exist against the largest dimensions of time and space. Our Town solves the problems of stagecraft by avoiding them. "There's some scenery for those who think they have to have scenery," comments the Stage Manager when two trellises are pushed out onto the stage. There are lighting directions--and Lewis Lehman's lighting was effective--but one has the feeling that the play could get by on the one bare bulb which shines on the stage...
Dealing with subjects as homely as breakfast, gossip, and walking home from school, actors are very likely to betray the fact they are acting, but this presentation of the adult world of Grovers Corners was nearly flawless. Wilder's characters remind you of people you know, despite differences in dress and accent. And the cast, especially Dixi DeWitt (Mrs. Webb) and Edward O'Callahan (Dr. Gibbs) made these characters real, in Wilder's sense of universal types...