Word: grusha
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...spectacular tour de force for Maggie Helmer as Grusha, the peasant girl. She floods the room with her subdued, determined strength, which generates into snarling anger when the provocation's mount up on her. She is charmingly ingenuous in one situation and rages like a mountain cat in the next. Her timing and spontaneity absorb us until we react in perfect parallel with her in each successive confrontation. She is the most sympathetic character I can recall...
...Grusha's disasters are set against two compellingly tender love scenes with the soldier Simon Chachava (Allan Present). They electrify each other with a touch or a glance so that they seem to merge as an organic unit. They tease and caress each other to soften their anxious probing of one another's desires. When they feel sure of each other, the action is amplified into a frenzied embrace or a rowdy wrestling match. The improvisational use of exaggerated physical interaction between characters is stunningly appropriate throughout the play (in contrast to the uneven use of the same technique...
David Baker is dazzling as the Ironshirt sergeant, He comes on like Mick Jagger (with a little more sadism and a little less swish), bare-chested, sinewy, undulating for nookie (preferably Grusha's, but any will do). The cruelty of the character, the very unfunny blood-lust of a hired killer, can easily be seen through the thin veil of caricature . Baker's talent, too, comes across in the contrast between his major role and one of his bit parts. As Grusha's hen-pecked brother Lavrenti, he offers a spiritual (at the least) eunuch as pathetic...
...Caucasian Chalk Circle, by Bertolt Brecht, is a kind of pinko version of The Perils of Pauline. Grusha (Elizabeth Huddle) is a good soul, a simple kitchen maid who snatches up an infant princeling when the child is abandoned by the evil wife of the governor during a revolution in a legendary kingdom around A.D. 1200. With the baby strapped to her back, Grusha embarks on a series of adventures that include crossing a rotting bridge over a 2,000-ft. gorge with soldiery in hot pursuit, a marriage of inconvenience with a draft dodger, and a confrontation several years...
...Symonds), a sort of pie-eyed Falstaff in a sloppy judicial gown, prescribes the test of the chalk circle to determine the true mother. The little boy stands in the center of the circle, and each woman holds one of his arms and is told to tug him out. Grusha lets go so as not to hurt the boy, and is adjudged the true mother for acting motherly. The moral: "What there is shall go to those who are good for it." This could prove that millionaires are best qualified to have money, but Brecht uses it to justify...