Stan Ovshinsky

We attended the preview of DANTON’S DEATH, the first play by the Repertory Theatre of the Lincoln Center in their new, attractive Vivian Beaumont Theatre.

The directors, Herbert Blau and Jules Irving, were previously co-producers of the San Francisco Actors’ Workshop where they had earned acclaim for the imaginative and excellence of their productions.

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First Letter: ‘In The House of the Hanged, One Does Not Speak of the Hemp.’

Today there’s a great deal of preaching to young people. One can hear the tongue clicking of sophisticated adults worrying about what is happening to the younger generation. There’s also the thoughtless embracing of the superficial fads of youth today by those adults who wish to appear to be “with it.” I don’t feel I’ve suffered from any generation gap, at least, this is how you have always treated me, so let’s get to the heart of some of the important things that bother all of us, Young and old, today. I have never worshipped at any shrine and I know that you, at least, will not mind the irreverence that I might express. After all, one of the things I want to warn you about is not to accept a man’s words except as you learn from them, but judge him by his deeds as you see him.

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Saturday night, January 14, at the Meadow Brook Theater was a Brechtian evening in more ways than one. A youthfully middle-aged audience, whose appearance and intermission conversation would have been classified by Brecht as bourgeois, reacted enthusiastically to a first-rate production of his ‘The Caucasian Chalk Circle.’ Despite the fact that it was an opening play for a new company, it was in some respects better than the production by the Lincoln Center Repertory Theater in New York last year.

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