Word: scripting
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Sounds like material for a couple of Seinfeld episodes right there, but on this particular day, more pressing work is at hand. After lunch the two will repair to the Seinfeld offices on the Studio City lot across the street to rewrite this week's script -- a script that is already late and getting later. Yet they seem unfazed; on the Seinfeld show, scrambling to keep up is business as usual...
Charllott Keatley's My Mother Said I Never Should is a family saga tracking the relationships between mothers and daughters over four generations. But if this description calls up visions of an evening of sick-making emotionalism, don't despair. The script steers well clear of any such dangerous terrain...
Jayme Koszyn's direction is consistently admirable. Unlike the actresses' accents, the script's rapid shifts in time and space never become disorienting. Clever use of props and dramatic changes in lighting create maximum mood changes in minimal time: The pace of the production could not be slicker. Sound effects are used to particular advantage. Although the only characters physically on stage are the four women themselves, the presences of the key men in their lives are made apparent through associated noises. Great-grandfather Jack is represented by a lawnmower, for example, with an efficacy which led me to wonder...
Koszyn keeps the tone of the production so lighthearted that the underlying melancholy of the script is downplayed, if anything. One by one we see the women's high expectations and ideals sacrificed to the routines imposed by domesticity and work. Jennifer McGeorge as Jackie has particular problems at times portraying the character's inner suffering. There are, however, some remarkable performances elsewhere--notably by Vanessa "Barbara" Milton as her mother...
This may well be as much attention to blacks as Broadway audiences would allow in 1927, but today the narrative defects of Oscar Hammerstein II's book are too glaring for Prince's razzmatazz to overcome. At best the script is a faint and fractured ghost of Edna Ferber's overstuffed novel. At worst it is a herky-jerky alternation of melodramatic vignettes yanked out of context and escapist bursts of clowning and dance...