Word: zoditch
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...smaller roles, Richard Grusin and Shirley Wilber also deliver telling, pungent performances. Seen most recently as Zoditch in the A.R.T. production of Journey of the Fifth Horse. Grusin demonstrates here his ability to play a balding, affected, overweight Hollywood producer as well as a sour old reader in a 19th-century Russian publishing house. As the mother, Wilbur is appropriately fussy and matronly: Her high nasal whine sounds very good...
Chulkaturin, infinitely more pleasant than Zoditch, has become gently pensive as a result of his own failure to win hearts both male and female. After one aborted attempt to win a girl's heart and thus to make an impression, he retreats--very gracefully, for a graceless character--into the background, and dies without complaint...
...male stars act impeccably. Grusin's twitching, hunched, sour-eyed Zoditch recalls a Scrooge who has out-eaten his suit size and suffers itching and cramping as a result. Benedict constructs a mournful, perpetually apologetic Chulkaturin who simultaneously invites scorn and nurturing, contempt and sympathy. In a lesser part, Jeremy Geidt plays a convincingly gruff, patriarchal Ozhogin, father to the object of Chulkaturin's clumsy and unrequited youthful affections...
...interplay of Chulkaturin's memories and Zoditch's quotidian existence is handled very cleverly even on a purely physical level. Because the memoirs come alive only through the readership of Zoditch, Chulkaturin's history is played out among the paraphernalia of Zoditch's boarding house. The first reader's bed serves the focus for much of the action--parior scenes, forest scene, garden scenes all occur around the bed, on which Zoditch, himself sits, reading the manuscript, impervious and scornful...
Journey of the Fifth Horse, then, is a poignant, painful play about the inability of two men to traced their irrelevance. Unimportant in and of themselves, they cannot even gain confort from human championship; Chulkaturm suffers rejection and Zoditch forestalls it by taking the initiative and rejecting is not content however merely to relate a parable about a first reader a landowner, and a fifth horse. His play forces an unwelcome conclusion that this busy noisy Hurried thing called life is little is more than a futile lonely groping in the dark...