Word: gitter
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...Dean Gitter, who plays The Boss, has molded a character that is at once Brecht, Boss, and audience. His reactions to the events of the play -- to the East German workers' uprising -- are camouflaged with wit and contempt for three full acts. We can detect little going on in his mind, save reflex action, but we are nonetheless forced into the same chair in which he sits, to consider the same events with the same condescending ambivalence. In the fourth act, when the uprising is over and The Boss at last permits himself to respond -- to its "defeat...
Maver has reinforced the audience's identification with The Boss by placing him on a platform extended out from the stage. Much of the time he simply sits there, a patron himself, slowly absorbing the events of which he has chosen not to be part. Yet Gitter's detached performance is a masterpiece of contradiction. With small, restrained gestures, and occasional movements of the mouth with and without voice, he echoes and narrates the production. Physically he has come as close to Brecht as his appearance permits, but he is never even tempted toward mimicry, and the potentially cheap laughs...
...Besides Gitter's, there are three truly polished performances. Stephen Kaplan, as Erwin, acts out The Boss's dilemma in an underplayed, hysterically funny idiom. Kathryn Walker plays an actress in and out of character with precisely the right degree of mannerism, preserving her identity as both a woman and a woman of the theatre. And Arthur Friedman, despite gestures which become too broad a little too often, is a properly ugly, self-assured and obedient cultural bureaucrat...
...Manheim into compelling, if at times none too lucid, verse. The always-present theme -- of a playwright's relation to the world of politics -- is stated, dissected, and reworded a thousand times during Plebeians' oddly structured course. But a production as fascinating as any in memory, and a performance--Gitter's--that totally transcends the usual boundaries of academic theatre, draw The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising onto new ground as often as its author returns...
Joan Tolentino gives Marie a depth-of-character the part needs. She sings, too. In the character roles, Andrew Weil and Dean Gitter are wonderful as the captain and the doctor respectively. Weil doubles as a circus barker and recites a double-talk speech about a performing horse, with all the necessary self-consciousness. Gitter makes the play's ending every bit as ghastly as it should...