CMU School of Drama


Wednesday, February 03, 2010

City Theatre's 'Clockmaker' a little cuckoo despite moving moments

Post Gazette: "For its midwinter entry, City Theatre brings us wife-beating, personal failure, murder and metaphysical murkiness with misogyny on the side. It's a comedy."

2 comments:

mrstein said...

This is the first post gazette review i've read that's actually been negative, the gazette usually loves everything. I don't know if that means Pittsburgh has awesome theatre or the critic isn't very critical, or both. In terms of the actual play, this definitely seemed like a very bizarre concept. The idea of a story concerning a somewhat crazy cuckoo clock maker is definitely original, but it seems the story may have gone off the deep end. Like the critic said with the plot description, the story just seems all over the place. I found the design of the set really interesting, but I don't know how well that can help the situation of the script.

S. Kael said...

This whole play seems so disjointed that even the article begins to seem like its pulling from twenty different sources. Trying to understand where the playwright got all of his inspiration from (the names, the sudden shifts in time, the cuckoo clocks?) really makes me wonder how the process of creating a world that's so dynamic works. Better yet, with such a complex string of events and flow of time, how does a director even begin to pinpoint key moments and guide the actors toward a common theme?

The only thing I did like about what the article got into was the set--the strange angles could definitely add another layer of peculiarity to the work and enhance the characters' apparent oddity.