A Not Too Happy Holiday
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
On STAGE A Not Too Happy Holiday By Joseph T. Shipley Thesmophoriazusae. By Aristophanes. Presented by Ray Boyle and Yolanda Betbeze. At the Rooftop Theater. The Azuma Kabuki Dancers. Presented...
...Aside from the fact that the cast plays the farce like a college sophomores' romp, the man) allusions to Euripides' plays are lost on the modern audience...
...Out of the usual broken family, with hints of insanity, the young fellow goes on to avowed villainy...
...Red Roses for Me...
...almost breaking up the officer's home in the first year of peace...
...Perhaps, bewitched by past critical accolades, the playwright feels himself in duty bound to strain for poesy at every moment: Every character, even the matter-of-fact inspector wooing the girl of the man he's killed, must ever seek an image, butter the parsnip of his prose...
...She might have won without this cruel gesture...
...but it should have been greeted with more fanfare as the first American performance of Aristophanes' farce of the women's fertility festival, Thesmophoriazusae...
...At the Holiday Theater...
...the slump into bedraggled despair once more, for from the delirium of the dancing we plod in the death-march of strained rhetoric...
...The Righteous Are Bold...
...The Greek play was off-Broadway and is now off the stage...
...Third Person...
...Third Person shows an attachment between an officer and a young soldier, matured in years of war...
...Presented by Gordon W. Pollock...
...The holiday season brought not the usual quantity of plays, but an unusual variety...
...Better writing might have made this a gripping story: the author overcomplicates the young man, and provides an elderly epigrammatist whose cynical observations dismally fail to scintillate...
...Such an attitude, however, had already insured that the soul of the play had departed...
...Presented by S. Hurok with the cooperation of H. I. H. Prince Takamatsu and the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs...
...The husband loves him, but—despite the lad's two earlier suicide attempts—ignores the ominous telephone to go to his wife...
...It might have been an off-Broadway success...
...By Frank Carney...
...The play begins with the hero, colorfully clad, reciting Shakespeare: for the rest of the evening, in less colorful costume, the cast recites O'Casey...
...Presented by David Clive...
...The reference to swearing with the tongue and not the heart, for instance, is a jibe at words of Alcestis which were hissed when first spoken in Euripides' play, and which aroused such indignation in ancient times that Cicero, some 400 years later, could sneer at them...
...At the Broadway Theater...
...By Sean O'Casey...
...To the festival comes a man disguised, father-in-law of Euripides, in order to uncover the women's plot to punish Euripides for his attacks on them in his plays...
...The Righteous Are Bold, about a girl who returns from "God-forsaken" England literally possessed of the devil...
...By Andrew Rosenthal...
...Whether it be the sad summoning of death, which comes even to lovers, or the lure of a witch seeking a human to master, or the downfall of an over-suspicious lord, costume and grace of gesture and pose combine in rhythms of beauty...
...The pumping poetaster defeats the good actors—Eileen Crowe as the mother of all mothers...
...Kevin McCarthy—who sometimes make the hero believable...
...One episode leavens the stage, when the beggars and drifters beneath the Dublin bridge brighten with the hero's prophecy and whirl in a dance of fantasied joy and triumph...
...Out of Japan have come the beauty of gesture and color, the stylized patterns of dance and drama, that in the Kabuki Players should delight all lovers of the delicate and subtle effects of Oriental art...
...For present notice are clustered one play of old Ireland dying, one of new Ireland bursting to be born, one of ancient Greece, one of psychological turmoil in New York today, and a touch of beauty from Japan...
...There is beauty and vigor, too...
...If you can put yourself in the mood of those who believe this possible, you will feel the grisly power of the battle that leads a priest to give up his mortal life to save an immortal soul...
...it is too special for the commercial theater...
...At the President Theater...
...in Eddie Dowling's play out of old Ireland...
...there is much bawdy humor and slapstick, until they release the old man in return for Euripides' promise to write well of them...
...More pretentious is Red Roses for Me, another of Sean O'Casey's plunges into rebellious Ireland...
...But oh...
...Presented by Eddie Dowling...
...The women discover him...
...At the Booth Theater...
...The theme is O'Casey's only one: Workers rebel, soldiers kill, the hero is martyr, and all will be well in an Ireland the people have set free...
...The play says nothing new in language too determinedly poetical to be poetic...
...I'm glad to have had the opportunity to see the play, but the audience could hardly bring its own footnotes...
...Had the girl been less violent, this hit of the Dublin stage might have been more persuasive here...
...the symbol seemed more important than the soul...
...E. G. Marshall: Whitford Kane...
Vol. 39 • January 1956 • No. 3
