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Mike Nichols' staging, alas, is too ornate and stately, its pace slowed by pregnant pauses and suspense-draining scene changes. Moreover, the actors seem weirdly naturalistic for so polemic a text. Close never gets crazy enough for the audience to doubt whether she is right, as must happen to sustain tension. Dreyfuss goes right to the expedient, exploitative core of the husband without visiting the needed surface idealism and charm. Hackman's performance does not engage guilt or innocence; it remains stuck at bafflement throughout. These are high-voltage talents giving low-wattage portrayals...
...very first thing is she is born into the world, to me the end was like the womb closing back up, sucking her back up. Not about any chrysanthemum opening. No. [With] Dream Play, I'd say, I violated more of the integrity of the text than any other time. Because I didn't tell that story. It came from when I wanted to be a painter in theater, now I think storyteller is something I need to be as well...
...didn't spend enough time weaving together, we were so busy exploding ideas. The rehearsal process I have, it gets so big, so huge. They didn't have a text, they only had a bare-bones text one week before the show...
There's two ways to get stuck: do a "good" production, be faithful to something, or [the second way is] trappings, images, effects not rising out of the heart of the text. I know I can be accused of trappings, but I know that trappings in the end are empty...
Zora's Kitchen is Ross's first full-length play, having previously done only adaptions of plays such as A Midsummer Night's Dream. He described this particular adaptation as very close to the original text, except that he and a friend cut it and arranged it with stage directions. This process, he said, prompted him to write the original script for Zora's Kitchen...