Word: hectored
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...darkest and most destructive comedy (as the program notes fashionably term the entire play) in the last few scenes, Schmidt reverses the entire style of his own production to heavy and symbolic drama, groping I presume for an ending via sudden spurts of electronic music and taped dialogue replays. Hector is strung up before our very eyes, the lighting goes all blood red in back of him a rewrite of the text overemphasizes the ironies of love and war, and everything soars to a climax...
...another across the stage three times, Shakespeare resorting to familiar mechanics prior to an important killing as he does in Macbeth and several of the history plays. But the killing never comes, they fight their way offstage, we never see them again, our expectations are brutally cheated. Instead, Hector (decidedly the wrong man at this point) gets killed with his pants down by Achilles, and the play ends with nothing resolved and the play ends with nothing resolved and the taste in your mouth resembling, in Harvard playwright Barry Forman's terms, the bottom of a birdcage...
...smaller parts, Ronald Hunter as Hector and Louis Plante as Ajax were excellent, attempting successfully to take characters whom audiences associate with moral and physical arche-types and make them something quite different. Arthur Friedman didn't look a day older than he did playing Aufidius in a recent Loeb Coriolanus and consequently didn't convince me he was senile old Nestor for a minute...
Only those who were inside know exactly what testy Coach Hector ("Toe") Blake, 55, said when he barred the doors of the last-place Montreal Canadiens' dressing room Christmas night. But whatever Toe said, his words worked. The Canadiens won 30 of their remaining 41 games and skated away with the National Hockey League's East Division championship. They then wiped out the Boston Bruins (4 games to 0), the Chicago Black Hawks (4-1), and finally the West Division's St. Louis Blues (4-0) to win their eighth Stanley Cup in 13 years...
...voice of doom in the play belongs to Cassandra, played with cranky, New Yorky irritation by Diana Sands in a black bikini. The voice of reason belongs to Hector, who is humane but soporifically dull, although Philip Bosco has talent enough to take half the curse off the part. As he talks sense to his fellow Trojans and debates with the wily Ulysses, Hector seems always on the verge of averting the madness of war. Actually, it is merely a delaying action against ultimate defeat. For Giraudoux is bent on proving that there is a vile instinct in man that...