Word: hancocks
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...should be than for his plays themselves, his plays, with the exception of The Threepenny Opera, are too rarely produced. We prefer arguing about Communism, the didactic theater, the epic theater, the A-effect, and the V-effect (alienation or Verfremdungseffekt, depending upon your degree of snobbery). As John Hancock's superb production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle demonstrated, Brecht was too much an artist to be seduced by his own theories. The stage of the Loeb Drama Center was from more than an animated lecture platform. (The program calls it the Loeb Dramatic Drama Center, and I will allow...
...drawn on the ground. The governor's wife wins the tug-of-war, but Grusha is awarded the child, because she loves him enough not to harm him. The moral of the tale is that the child and the stream must go to those who use them best. Mr. Hancock's cutting of everything dealing with the collective farm is silly politically and dramatically, for the last three lines of the play, "And the valley to the waterers, that it bring forth fruit," becomes poetically lewd in a way Brecht wouldn't have appreciated...
...that is my only quibble with Mr. Hancock. His direction was otherwise an inspired and faithful interpretation of Brechtian techniques, for which the Loeb is well suited. Titles are flashed on a curtain covering the lower half of the stage; an enormous revolve turns as Grusha and the soldiers march; music comes from offstage to accompany the songs; and scenery is moved in a public and unabashed way. The tension between the formality of the staging and the tenderness of the story makes for Brecht's tough beauty, and Hancock understood and used it with joyful discrimination...
...relatively minor actors also gave outstanding performances--Jean Weston as the prim and vicious governor's wife and Robert P. Youngsberg as the loutish corporal. Brecht displayed his discretion in not giving the little prince any speaking lines, and Mr. Hancock displayed his in choosing a beautiful urchin to play the role...
...with an unusually ambitious schedule of five major productions, clearly had a successful season--a welcome change from the poor one of the previous year. The opening choice, Williams' The Glass Menagerie, received an affecting rendition in Agassiz under the direction of John D. Hancock '61--with laudable work in each of its four roles by Mary Graydon, Kathryn Humphreys '60, Joel Crothers '62, and Peter G. Gesell '61. There followed, under John C. Beck '60, an adequate if unexciting traversal of Giraudoux's Tiger at the Gates at Pi Eta. In the spring, Agassiz housed the group's intriguingly...