Word: tableaux
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...play unfolds as a series of unconnected tableaux, almost like a poetry reading, which chronicle the important events in Mary's life, such as the publication of her book and her rift with her family. In these vignettes, the two Mary's serve as foils to each other. May's idealism rebounding off Mary's deathbed cynicism. The other characters--her father, a publisher, a beau--move on and off the stage with an case oblivious to the tension between the two main characters. Like figures in a tableau they never break into the third dimension...
...displaced the easel set, Southern California's Laguna Beach is better known these days for a kind of living Louvre. Each July and August, as the crowning glory of its 50-year-old Festival of the Arts, the town mounts a Pageant of the Masters: a display of tableaux vivants reproducing famous artworks with human figures in a 12-ft. by 30-ft. picture frame onstage. The show runs slightly more than two hours at an outdoor theater called the Irvine Bowl...
...locals act as if their tableaux came down from Mount Parnassus. Some 4,500 dues-paying ($5 a year) members of the festival organization have the right to buy 16 tickets at up to $20 each. "The pageant is a chance for us to be part of something creative," explains Clem Troy Sr., a Laguna-based engineer, who, with his wife and three children, has taken part in four of them. "I'm no artist myself, but the pageant is part of this country's culture...
...abstract expressionists. Not to worry. "You have to understand the people of Laguna," Eytchison allows. "I am concerned with retaining their tradition. Of course, the show has to be bigger and better every year, but you can only stretch so far." This year's edition stretches to 24 tableaux, each of which is shown for about 90 seconds. They range from classics like Degas' Dancers Practicing at the Bar and Seurat's Bathing to canvases by American painters Winslow Homer (Crab Fishing off Yarmouth) and John Sloan (Picnic Grounds). There are also reproductions of a medieval tapestry...
Though it is now the centerpiece of the Festival of Arts, the pageant started almost as an afterthought. The festival itself was launched in 1932 to publicize the work of Depression-hit Laguna artists. A year later, Painter John Hinchman hit on the idea of staging tableaux vivants, similar to the scenes mounted on Sundays in some Victorian parlors. The "stage" was a roped-off section of a street. As Salome holding the severed head of John the Baptist, Margo Goddard, now 71, became the pageant's first nude in 1936 but swore she would never pose again after...