Word: witchingly
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...announcement of the French movie version of Arthur Miller's The Crucible is dominated by two abstract blobs that on closer inspection turn out to be the gnarled claws of an old witch. A poster for a Federico Fellini film on the demoralization of youth shows youth as a bird hovering over a twisted treelike abstraction symbolizing society. A music festival is announced by a semiabstract landscape still wet with rain and crowned with lowering clouds. Across this tense scene that hovers between sun and storm is written, in an elegant 19th century hand, the signature "F. Chopin...
...suppose that one of the functions of the Poets' Theatre is to produce bad plays by minor poets. There is no need, however, to produce them badly. Peter Viereck's The Tree Witch is mediocre poetry and abysmally bad drama. Last week's production at the Loeb Drama Center was as embarrassingly bad as the play itself...
...worse than bad thought and bad poetry, The Tree Witch is bad drama. Four men have captured a dryad. Frightened of this child of light, they ask the help of three women (known as the Aunts) in crushing the dryad. A series of attacks are made on the dryad, in the course of which it becomes drearily apparent that the Aunts and the dryad are struggling for the souls of the men. Finally, predictably, the Aunts are recognized as the Furies (surely, after Eliot and Sartre, the old ladies deserve a rest) and, forced to a choice...
...letting the audience know what is happening by means of large signs, but they need not have been carried on and off by an overweight female in slacks. Finally, Deborah Steinberg (the dryad) deserves some praise for her voice, but an attractive young girl cannot become a tree witch simply by taking off her shoes and putting on a green dress...
...Editor's Note: A review of the Poets' Theatre production of "The Tree-Witch" will appear Monday...