Word: play
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Hole has a hole for a set, and it is a metaphysical absurdity to discuss the competence with which a hole is rendered. (Its surroundings will do.) The play is preceded at the Club 47 by A Resounding Tinkle (also an American premiere), a slighter and less interesting drama in which Beryl Kinrose-Wright provides a particularly fine performance...
Clearly, this is very much a do-it-yourself play, in which form and meaning are not obvious in the script. Such a play requires exceedingly skillful direction and acting if it is to appear coherent enough and meaningful enough for the spectator to want to puzzle about it and pour his own interpretation into the container Simpson has provided. (And it is a moderately flexible receptacle, although there are limits to how far the elastic will stretch.) On the basis of last night's dress rehearsal, the production appears fully to meet the demands of the script. Stephen Aaron...
George Bolton and Ed O'Callahan as Cerebro and Soma make believably solid citizens, and they can say absurd things without blinking an eyelash, which is what the play requires. Fred Morehouse and Endo seemed overly conscious of himself as an actor last night, where the apparent consciousness of the others was of their stage personages, rather than their off-stage personalities. Randy Echols' Visionary has little to do (which is very difficult for an actor to do well) and Echols is fine at it. He has a touching moment of pathos and beauty at the end of the play...
Coming after Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Winter's Tale, The Tempest caps a magnificent interrelated tetralogy, the dramatist's counterpart to the late Beethoven quartets Op. 130-133. All four plays explore the estrangement-remorse-reconciliation theme. But The Tempest is extraordinarily rich in meanings--in Mark Van Doren's felicitous words, "Any set of symbols, moved close to this play, lights up as in an electric field." Whatever else it may be, the play is a masterful study of the use and abuse of liberty (how often the very words "liberty," "free" and "freedom" crop up in the text...
...this production, all the great roles of the play are expertly handled. The central character is, of course, the wise, bookish philosopher-magician Prospero, who prospers indeed in the hands of Morris Carnovsky. Carnovsky's performance is one to put with the unsurpassable Shylock he achieved three years ago. He brings a resonant voice, great dignity, and deep understanding to a most difficult role. He is even able to command attention all through his long opening narrative. And towards the end, after his most famous speech, when he says, "A turn or two I'll walk, To still my beating...