Word: bergreen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Eliot House--Master Alan Heimert '49 is notoriously keen on culture, and this fall the New Harvard Players are working in conjunction with the Eliot House Drama Society on an adaptation of five of Shakespeare's comedies. The director, Larry Bergreen '72, feels that plot is over-emphasized in drama, so he has put together excerpt containing certain themes, characterizations and songs for a unique view of the comedies. Billy Bauman '72 composed original music for the production. It will play in Eliot House December...
...productions have experimented with short, often merely schematic, stories. Broadway's current, warmly received Story Theatre opened with a collection of Grimms' Fairy Tales and is shortly to add a sampling of Ovid's Metamorpheses. A selection of Revolutionary War tales is in preparation. While at the Loeb, Laurence Bergreen, Huck Finn's director, himself staged a handful of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales last semester...
...Twain's Huckleberry Finn in the story theatre manner is a much more ambitious project. It's rather like going at a glacier with a pick axe. Not that Twain's story is unmanageable. It's simply that its familiar episodes continually threaten to overwhelm the staging techniques that Bergreen uses to bring the ungraceful narrative to life. Few of his scenes take on an independence of their own and, as a consequence, the audience is left viewing something that looks more like conventional drama than improvisation (and more like high school pageantry than anything else) without experiencing...
...Bergreen has reorganized-and necessarily simplified-Twain in order that Huck's gradual recognition of the nigger Jim's humanity and, more than that, friendship provide a thematic structure. In counterpoint are arranged those episodes ashore in which Huck discovers the prevailing inhumanity of most other pre-Civil War, Mississippi Valley traditions. Perhaps because for many in the audience, suspense is precluded by knowledge of the book, while, for the rest, the bare precis that remains appears emotionally shallow, Huck's journey down the Mississippi lacks even the rudimentary sense of adventure that Tom Sawyer would demand of such...
...been unwilling to take a chance on failing, with the result that anything not time-honored and safe is ignored. Productions often display that lack of imagination that leads critics to lament the death of theatre as an art form. It is refreshing, then, to see a production like Bergreen's that takes chances and succeeds. The theatre at Harvard needs productions that do not mistake convention for art. Canterbury Tales is a step in the right direction...