Word: zindel
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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There are dragon ladies breathing fire on the stage of Broadway's Martin Beck Theater. Paul Zindel has conceived of a raw, strident all-woman power struggle for control of a regional theater called the "Alamo" in Texas City, Texas. The bitchy confrontations in his play make the feline spats in Clare Boothe Luce's The Women sound like the popping of ladyfingers...
MAME Directed by GENE SAKS Screenplay by PAUL ZINDEL...
However kind the camera tries to be to her, Miss Ball is still the victim of her vehicle. Jerry Herman's music and lyrics ("You make carnations bloom in the mud, Ma-aa-me") abuse the ear. The screenplay, by the Pulitzer-prizewrnning playwright Paul Zindel, is full of inexcusable dialogue ("I haven't got you anything for Christmas yet, but how about a kiss on account?" "You know who Mame is-she's the Pied Piper"). Beatrice Arthur, the rage right now as television's Maude, brings the movie to life whenever she appears...
...Zindel's written a strong script that fights any attempt to butcher it. His man-in-the-moon marigolds are the subject of an award-winning science project built by Tillie, Beatrice's half-test tube. In the life that Beatrice leads in an old vegetable store with her daughters, the other an epileptic, and a senile, decayed nanny, the marigolds, for the first time, make her proud. Zindel skillfully draws a portrait of Beatrice's shattered life, of epileptic Ruth's rebellion and Tillie's strength in her world of scientific experiments--and the tightrope walk of their dependence...
...hard for me to pass judgement on this production. In one way, she is outstanding, in another, she is terrible. She creates a Beatrice who is a wonderfully consistent, three dimensional person--an all too rare accomplishment for an amateur. But, tragically, her Beatrice is not the person Zindel wrote, and this throws the production off balance. She is too low-key, too gently humorous. She doesn't bite or sting, and doesn't build up the bitterness that brings her to cry at the end of the play, "I hate the World...