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quality of an allegory without its depth of meaning. Presumably, this is intentional--the promotions for the play reading "Dorf on Life" announce its vaguely allegorical purpose. The text offers an absurdist vision that is as empty as a Zen koan, as resonant as the sound of one hand clapping. Rob and Bobby's disclosures on Life read like something off a fortune cookie or bumper sticker: "A life full of love is like being a poor person with a refrigerator--you don't have one," and "Life's a marathon and then you run one." Best...
...Punctuated by puns and wordplay, it succeeds in pulling laffs as often as it fails. Bobby (Sean Williford) and Rob (Joel Rainey) conduct a whirlwind, rapid-fire dialogue that frequently disintegrates into slurs and incoherence, a problem that rests as much with the actors' nervous pitch as with the text itself...
...same frenetic energy as humorous ones. At one point Bobby, as fed up with Rob's hackneyed moralizing and witless witticisms as we are, goes on a rampage in which he brings the play's quick pace to a grinding halt--at least it reads this way in the text. Yet Rainey delivers the speech with the same monochromatic, sugar-high intensity that characterizes most of Bobby's delivery. The result is an indeterminate dramatic haze that kills moments of potential power...
This problem of dramatic tension and variation is complicated by the fact that this play treats itself with frank absurdity and insouciance. As Rob remarks at one point, "Even when something happens here, nothing happens." The text seems to strive for the bizarre comedy of nothingness epitomized in Waiting For Godot. In Beckett's work, though nothing happens, the audience is satisfied and even amused. But these characters lack the magnetism and originality of a Vladimir or an Estragon...
...year's new agency heads are Tobey Weintraub '92, of Catering; Scot Landry '92, of Direct Sales; Fred Jenkins '92, of Distribution; Malcolm Miles '93, of Linen; Zanley Galton '92, of Publishing; Michael L. Campbell '93, of Sales Group; Matthew Kirsch '93, of Student Resources; Jason Jue '93, of Text Processing; Brian Goler '93, of Travel; and Grace Yeh '93, of Union...