Word: zito
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...meaningless grooves and follow instincts and impulses represent the minimalist thesis that most lives reduce to a few short intense moments. Gripping the production of David Mamet's Reunion tightly as a pack of howling canines chasing an axe murderer, director Sam Samuels and actors Alice Brown and Ralph Zito prove, with their restraint, the minimalist theory...
Each play involves only two characters: a father and daughter. In Reunion,a married daughter meet with her middle-aged father for the first time in about 25 years. Without the poignant sensitivity Brown and Zito bring to their roles, even Mamet's extraordinary script and Samuel's tight directing would have no effect on an audience. From the first moment Brown walks on stage, she fills the room with tension and suppressed hatred, anger and deeply buried love. The utter awkwardness of her character's situation increases and emerges more clearly as the dialogue continues. Compulsively smoking, fidgeting with...
...Zito, as the father, complements Brown precisely, his pent-up guilt and lonleiness spilling over as he rushes through the apartment attempting to bring a vestige of normalcy to a hopelessly uncomfortable situation. The complex role never eludes him, and his grasp of the intricacies of this 53-year old divorced ex-alchoholic is astounding for someone Zito...
...changes to the single automobile seat of Dark Pony, the gaps of ambiguity widen. A father recites a familiar fairytale to his young daughter as they drive home in the car. Brown and Zito are convincing enough, but the point of the play is muddy. When they repeat the same scene after Reunion, the tale is again unclear, and a little annoying. A juxtaposition of two stages of a relationship, maybe, but they are not even the same relationship. Perhaps Samuels thought Reunion too short and heavy in its transcendant minimalism, and so included the other; otherwise, there seems little...
...actors frequently shout to be heard, which serves to exaggerate the difference in age between them and their roles. Ralph Zito turns the twisted, self-centered Serebriakov into a buoyant, strapping cartoon villain. When Vanya charges him with ruining his life in their third-act confrontation, Zito rushes across the platforms to the other side of the house, breathing heavily and staring over the audience like a character in melodrama who can't face the awful truth. But the horror of Serebriakov is that he is too full of himself to begin to understand what Vanya is talking about. Instead...