Cover photo by Gerry Goodstein
"Joe Pintauro's BESIDE
HERSELF...is a real uplifter....
Mary Candee is a woman whose
life has not turned out the way she imagined....Pintauro's
heroine is, in short, a representation of Unfulfilled Womanhood,
and if she...had been conceived by a less subtle, elegant-minded
playwright, she would probably be a cliché....
...Three characters
materialize—apparitions, obviously—and enter into lively
conversation...you realize that these females are not creations
of the heroine's imagination, but earlier versions of herself....
...its juxtaposition of the
romantic and the banal...makes Pintauro's play alternately lovely
and piquant....
Instead of watching a character
relive past events (Willy Loman style), we see characters from
the past taking an unnatural interest in what is going on in the
present. Or else we're watching her younger selves watch the
heroine go through the motions of her life. It's funny and
poignant, and one of the best uses I've seen of the device of
representing the changing of the divided self by more than one
actor. Like the ghosts in...OUR TOWN, each of the apparitions
knows only her part of what has happened in the world and in the
heroine's life. (The little girl doesn't know that the Second
World War is over; the young girl doesn't know whom the heroine
wound up marrying; the woman in violet doesn't know that the
heroine's husband died.) The fact that each can understand only
what she could be expected to furnishes occasions for drama and
passion. There's a generosity toward actors in the way Pintauro
has given each of the apparitions a thematic and psychological
function...."
Mimi Kramer, The New Yorker
First produced by Circle Repertory Company in New York
3 M, 4 W
I S B N: 0-88145-084-7: $8.95