Word: marathon
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...MARATHON '33, by June Havoc, blends clowns and music and lacerated feet and shrieking nerves to prove that life is a grueling test rather like a 3,000-hour dance marathon. In this strange spectacle that suggests new directions for the U.S. theater, Julie Harris is put to the test, and her inspiring childlike ardor makes this one of her finest performances...
...Marathon '33, written and directed by June Havoc, is liberally laced with music and dance, yet it is not a musical. It is housed in a Broadway playhouse, but it is not a play. It is more nearly a spectacle-the kind that people have in mind when they talk of "making a spectacle of oneself," funny yet frightening, poignant, pitiable and a little tawdry. It follows no plot, but simply coils, sometimes slackly, sometimes snugly, around an event: a dance marathon. But it clings to an abiding vision that life is a grueling test, rather like...
...roped-off arena of a seedy American Legion hall, June (Julie Harris) seems least likely to endure. Her head is full of warm muzzy memories of the vaudeville circuit where she was a child star, just as Playwright Havoc, sister of Gypsy Rose Lee, once was. June finds the marathon degrading and unpalatable, but hunger makes her stomach it. From her partner, Lee Allen, she learns contest protocol: about the "horses" who drag-carry their sleeping partners around the floor with proud belligerence, and about the clowns who must check out after 1,000 hours because clowns are not supposed...
...risking monotony, by risking crummy jokes, by risking spontaneous little forays into sex, wistful interludes of conversation, jagged fragments of anger and malice, instead of calculated dramatic climaxes, Marathon '33 acquires the conviction of life as naturally as a city street gathers soot. With this production, Actors Studio Theater at least suggests, if it does not sustain, new directions for a theater that can no longer afford to stand still in the quicksand of Broadway formula...
...sounded like a talent hunt for rocket engineers. But this was pro football, at draft time, when the two leagues work up a lather over graduating college stars. In Manhattan, the American Football League drafted 160 players; in Chicago, the National Football League drafted 280-in a marathon session that started at 9:04 one morning, lasted until 6:47 the next...