Word: sermonized
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...editorial alluded to above was written about an incident involving compulsory chapel. It seems Labovitz and another student got up and walked out of the middle of a sermon on the material advantages of church membership. Labovitz says he was then called up by Edward R. Durgin, dean of students, and told that "if you don't like chapel, you shouldn't be at Brown." The Herald wrote an editorial criticizing various aspects of chapel, and they in turn were criticized. "I didn't feel that that was a very just move on the part of the University," William...
Thus, in his 495 documented pages, Levin attempts to relate the criminal folly of Leopold-Loeb to the greatest "crime of our century"-fascism and all the ideologies by which man justifies his crimes. Levin's sermon: if it is true that men are all parts of one another, then some part of every man is pretty terrible...
Charles Laughton has done a rare thing--he has taken George Bernard Shaw seriously. Instead of trying to pretend that Shaw is a clever buffoon and that Major Barbara is a drawing-room farce with some incidental ideas, Laughton has staged the play as the impassioned sermon which it really is. His actors therefore do not bounce about the stage, they stand still whenever possible, and frequently they stand facing the audience directly. To make sure that the audience--next to the playwright himself, the most important character in a Shavian drama--is drawn right into the action, he cleverly...
...play is a sermon, however, it preaches by demonstrating. Just as Shaw himself debates with the audience, so the play's principal character, Andrew Undershaft, engages in a series of verbal duels with the rest of the cast. Laughton and his designer, Donald Oenslager, chose to underline this element of Shaw's way of constructing the play by making the main feature of the set two identical benches, placed on opposite sides of the stage and remaining fixed even when the scene shifts to a different location. Laughton, playing the part of Undershaft, almost invariably sits on or stands near...
Despite the difficulty it gives some of the actors, this static way of staging Major Barbara is admirable. It is admirable because Laughton was willing to accept the play for what it is, at once a sermon and exhilirating theater. The director permitted Shaw to speak, enabling the old man to vindicate himself as a comedian--because the play is often very funny--and to prove it possible to make a play out of ideas. Perhaps the highest praise this production can get is that Shaw would have approved...