Word: tableaux
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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There are a trifle too many Chekhovian tableaux artily arranged by Director Tony Giordano - these are distinctly not those "sisters" - but Ladyhouse Blues is the sort of play Chekhov might have liked...
...Fool, Richard McElvain's Kent--clearly got the word from Cain to "be loving," to be tender, to fit his interpretation of the play in the program notes. They hug each other a lot, hold each other's arms, "are supportive," as the psychologists say; they form pieta-like tableaux of familial affection. There's little wrong with that, and it might make a valid production of Lear someday, but all the actors--not just the nuclear family--would have to work towards realizing it, and the director would have to apply it with a consistent hand...
...part of 20 years. They have also shown how art changes one's reading of other art. In the early 1960s, when Segal -the son of a New Jersey chicken farmer -first emerged as a sculptor, he was identified with Pop art. This happened because some of his tableaux had an aggressive, urban character and used real props: stacks of oil cans, winking beer neons, even the inside of a scrapped subway car, with seats, hanging straps, lights and all. Some 15 years later, after a revival of realism in American art that Segal, among others, helped...
Strong feeling does not necessarily make strong art, and Segal's tableaux might remain in the category of dramatic curiosities but for one quality: his laconic Tightness of arrangement. "In his use of space," one of the catalogue essays rather absurdly claims, "Segal is close to the minimalists," because, apparently, "Segal's figures energize their spaces." (And what sculpture, minimal or other, does not?) Nevertheless, Segal knows exactly how much distance to allot between one figure and another, how much emptiness should come between a silhouette in a bar and the profile of a metal letter...
SOME OF Drury's staging is quite effective. The set, a bare stage and a series of simple backdrops, is perfectly adequate as a frame for the Who's work. Some of the tableaux used by Drury early in the show are starkly evocative of the emotions of Tommy's early life. But the static presentation at the beginning of the show becomes boring. After more characters appear on stage, the drama becomes complicated enough to demand some movement on stage beyond that of a chorus wheeling in straight lines, or squatting, then standing, in unison...