Word: nathanisms
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...avoid it so studiously that even major orchestras find it difficult to hire string-section replacements. But Stern and four other greatly gifted players have lifted the solo violin to an eminence any age could envy. Standing with Stern as the world's finest: Zino Francescatti, David Oistrakh, Nathan Milstein, Jascha Heifetz...
...occasional sadistic delight. One of the functionaries is Plantagenet himself, who has programmed (in his own image) a self-operating machine which is called fate and which actually runs the earth. The "tertiary spiritual leader" nominally responsible for the earth, the official locally designated "God," appears here as Nathan Weltschmertz, an amiable, blundering fellow whose ambition to realize a personal utopia the machine continually frustrates...
...assists two lost souls to break through the barrier of earth into the void. The souls, Hector and Gnatalia (in a vague way Adam and Eve figures), pollute the atmosphere of the void; so much so that Rex Regis, a vice-President, must call upon Plantagenet to psychoanalyze Nathan, and persuade Him that He can in fact control His planet in His own way. And that the Doctor does, with what an earlier school of reviewing would call many riotous consequences...
...their own terms, one must be certain of exactly what these laws are. Here lies Wolfson's most irritating weakness, for he leaves his audience wondering about an enormous number of embarrassing technical matters. Why, after all, should lost souls produce a kind of "spiritual fallout"? Why should Nathan's metaphysics be so simple-minded that He cannot grasp the mechanics of good and evil on His earth? A lack of precision, a lack simply of detail, reduces much of Dr. Plantagenet to situation comedy in a wild setting. Its fascination is undeniable, but it derives far more from...
John Kulli's direction of the Lowell House production has shrewdly encouraged the play's most endearing virtues--its consistently high level of wit and the fundamental ingenuity of a plot that covers the historical epoch of man twice. Tom Segall as Nathan is a ludicrously, wonderfully pathetic God; Art Roberts (Rex Regis) is indistinguishable from a thousand harried executives. Plantagenet himself (Jere Whiting) seems determined to squeeze the juice from his lines; perpetually overcome by the cleverness of the dialogue he forgets that his significance lies not in his pose but in his machine. The grey hireling...