Word: parsons
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...regular sales force Eaton added a staff of "silent salesmen," as he called the works of art he assembled at Forest Lawn. The first of these was Edith Barrett Parson's Duck Baby, later followed by a vast sculpture group called The Mystery of Life, in which 22 figures watch a baby chick as it hatches out of an egg. From Europe, Eaton also brought back plans of three famous British churches-the one where Gray wrote his Elegy, the one where, according to legend, Annie Laurie prayed for her lost lover, the one where Kipling was (possibly) inspired...
Travis Linn (Parson Manders) gives the most convincing performance. His long speeches, often addressed to the painted fjords at the rear of the stage, are often flat, but, in his shorter lines, he managed to convey the Parson's fatuousness...
...first two acts of the play--before the audience learns of Osvald Alving's disease--are like a drawing room comedy, only with little humor. Even if the cast were superb, all that could hold the audience's attention is the pomposity of Parson Manders' (spiritual advisor to Mrs. Alving) and his inability to contend with Osvald's defense of illicit marriage. At great length, the characters speak to each other seriously, but pointlessly, setting up the few magnificent scenes before the final curtain...
Only toward the end of the second act does Mrs. Alving's character begin to evolve. Goaded by Parson Manders, she tells of her life with her husband. The third act includes some exquisitely written dramatic moments, as Mrs. Alving learns of her son's disease and Osvald (who has always lived away from home) of his father's profligacy...
...Dick Dudgeon, the imposturing knave of the title, Actor Douglas gnashes his teeth - as well as the arch dialogue -and looks less like the male Candida that Shaw intended than like a Sportin' Life in tights. Actor Lancaster, as the local parson, glooms away Shaw's most romantic scenes as if he were lost on a Brontë moor. In a climactic scene of comic derring-do, ex-Acrobat Lancaster makes heroic hash of a colonial court house and all the Redcoats in it. Otherwise he is as stiff and starchy as the clerical collar he eventually gives...