Word: mosse
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...most of the third act of the Harvard Dramatic Club's most recent offering, a highly gifted actor presents an extended monologue. George Hamlin, whose overdue return as a performer this production marks, delivers lines from a play by Boris Vian. He delivers the lines well, and Leland Moss seems to have directed both his readings and actions with productive care and considerable sensitivity to the text. That text itself is a curious animal, at once original and derivative, vital and turgid, intellectually inspiriting, and deadly dull...
...this evaluation of the finest moments of this production seems essentially noncommittal, it is because the production offers no further evidence upon which to base a judgement. Moss and Hamlin move to a confrontation with the text, a testing of the values of the playscript in terms of the demands of a real stage and a live audience, but sadly, the confrontation never takes place. The quality of the play remains an open question, not to be resolved on the Loeb stage. The production is finally a mixed bag, triumphant in many of its details, but so deeply divided against...
...character by Vian, and addled, compulsively verbal middle-class householder, who in the course of preceding acts has involuntarily sloughed all life's amenities, from family to furniture, and who, alone at last, must consider himself. Shuman, portraying The Smurtz, is a character from a play by Leland Moss, based, as they say in the movies, on an idea by Boris Vian. While Hamlin agonizes, Shuman methodically constructs an altar to the America of puerile plastics and persuasive packaging, raising a miniature tower of cereal boxes and cleanser cans. The Smurtz Vian wrote was a sort of ambulatory picture...
...heart of the confusion is Mr. Moss's personal touch. Some of his talent is apparent in a number of details: fine readings, well-pointed jokes, carefully arranged stage groupings. But something too much of his ability has been devoted to an attempt to avoid a confrontation with the text. His interpolations (among them a parody soap opera by distinguished Warholian, Gerard Malanga, and a number of creaky, smutty japes) are as distortive as they are entertaining. His choices in directing characters (especially the daughter of the family, who Mary Moss portrays with special spirit as a flaming youth...
...hard to criticize Mr. Moss for his attempt. It may well be that a production truly rooted with Vian's text would only serve to reveal its inadequacy. In any case, the effort to impose a special directorial vision on a play of dubious relevance is as admirable as it is misguided. And this is certainly not the place to question at length whether the horrors of American commercialism can really be satirized by any art work which chooses to borrow the terms of commercialism rather than create terms of its own. Mr. Moss's product is certainly worth...