Árni Ibsen wrote:
> Ghelderode is among my favourite playwrights. In my dramacourse days we had
> to write down a casebook about how we would stage "Pantagleize". I also
> played in "Escurial" and I played Death in something I think was called The
> Masque of Death. I also staged Three Actore, One Drama. In 1989 I wrote a
> modern variation on Escurial, a tragi-farce set in an executive office,
> which played in a double bill with the Ghelderode original and was
> subsequently televised. So Michel has played a role in my life.
I KNEW someone on this list would know Ghelderode! I don't know what
Patangleize is: Gh. called it "The Farce to Make You Sad," and I suppose
that fits. A political drama that isn't political because the central
character (what does he do, design clothing?) is a naif who gets sucked
into a revolution because he likes the people involved. Weird things--a
military tribunal, prosecutor, and defense attorney who get up and sing
songs. And the offense part: Pantagleize's black servant, called
"Bamboola." In the English translation I used, in 1972 the only one
available through Dutton, he talked at the level of Stepinfetchit and a
bad prefiguration of Jar Jar Binks: "Ooooooooooo me scared!" The guy I
saw play him even in 1964 was in my acting class in Manhattan; Milton
would have been considered a black militant--the absurdity of the
character didn't bother him a bit.
A year later, still an undergraduate, I got tapped to appear in a Hunter
College graduate Theatre program of three one-act plays. I got to play
the Executioner in Ghelderode's "Escorial," complete with black hood and
not a word to be said. What was funny was what I learned afterwards.
All the men shared a dressing room. The preceding play was Rolf
Luckner's "A Cry in the Streets," a morbid little German ditty from the
1920s about three vagrants who kill a prostitute. One of the actors
turned out later to be a significant poet and novelist named Larry
Woiwode. As one of the other vagrants was a young actor just starting
out, listed in the program as Bobby Di Niro. The third, in Escorial,
was a very tall guy named Richard Krisher, who I saw five years later as
a wimpy son-in-law in a Frank Sinatra "Tony Rome" movie.
For all I know I shared a greasepaint jar with Di Niro. That and a
buck-ninety-nine leaves me a penny short of a subway ride:-).
Ken
--
Kenneth Wolman
Proposal Development Department
Room SW334
Sarnoff Corporation
609-734-2538
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