Word: rican
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...once went beggaring to Shakespeare, then it's hardly surprising that so many playwrights and actors have also looked to him for inspiration. John Guare and Mel Shapiro found that the Two Gentlemen of Verona were still around in 1971, only they happened to be a black and Puerto Rican, just as West Side Story had flushed Romeo and Juliet out of Manhattan slums a decade earlier. Shakespeare's influence barely surfaces until the end of West Side Story, when it takes the form of a tragic denoument that is a cloying mistake. But Guare and Shapiro's adaptation gamely...
...Gentlemen spares the obvious potential for social statements in the black and Puerto Rican casting, limiting trendiness to the score. Shakespeare's plot remains largely intact, with its orderly parallels between pairs of individuals. There are the skeptics towards love, Julia and Valentine, and those who use seductive wiles to break them, Proteus and Silvia. There are the two masters and the two servants, each couple bound in friendship though capable of deceit. And then there's the dog Crab, who qualifies for both categories. The mutt is not only ungrateful for the constant companionship of Launce, he even sullies...
...treacherous Proteus with appropriately self-centered determination. At times he comes on to himself a little bit too strongly, wiping out the supporting cast through sheer force of neglect. But he displays admirable versatility, tripping with facility from the Spanish pronunciation and non-verbal cries of his Puerto Rican phrases to the controlled and conversational command of Shakespearean verse...
...length the tragedy of the Indians of the East, uprooted and sent West on the Trail of Tears. But in the next section, Colleague David Herbert Donald (who writes crisply on the Civil War) reduces the entire Indian conflict in the West to one paragraph. Americans of Puerto Rican or Mexican origin are given hardly a nod, and then a misguided one: the book asserts that Cesar Chavez's United Farm Workers movement "declined...
Emily M. Schneider '80, who will speak on the work of a Puerto Rican poet, Julia de Borgos, said she had become involved because "there's a paucity of things about women going on here...