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rhuDeuce is not one of Terrence McNally's best works, I'm afraid. It's of the class of play in which the characters, through discussing events of the past, slowly reveal more and more detail.
The two tennis players have dialog that occasionally sparkles with McNally's verbal wit, but those sparks are not enough to illuminate the true subject of the play, which is how we age, how we live, and how we die.
The sportscasters are not characters, they're parodies of a caricature. The less said about them....
The most three-dimensional character, and the only one to move around the stage, is the "admirer". I think that Michael Blakemore made a mistake by having the other four characters spend (almost) the entire play in their seats. It reinforced the static (or at least molasses-slow) nature of the script.
There are two video projections of the crowds in the stands. But they're the same group, shot from two different angles. So individuals in the two crowds are moving in exactly the same way at exactly the same time, which is the sort of thing that catches in your peripheral vision and distracts from the play.
There's an autograph album and they're admiring the autographs in it. But from where I sat, the pages of the book looked blank.
At one point they start complaining about how tennis players today grunt with every shot. Fine. And the sound effects of the tennis game include grunts starting with that scene. Why weren't the offstage players grunting until halfway through the second set?
The two tennis players have dialog that occasionally sparkles with McNally's verbal wit, but those sparks are not enough to illuminate the true subject of the play, which is how we age, how we live, and how we die.
The sportscasters are not characters, they're parodies of a caricature. The less said about them....
The most three-dimensional character, and the only one to move around the stage, is the "admirer". I think that Michael Blakemore made a mistake by having the other four characters spend (almost) the entire play in their seats. It reinforced the static (or at least molasses-slow) nature of the script.
There are two video projections of the crowds in the stands. But they're the same group, shot from two different angles. So individuals in the two crowds are moving in exactly the same way at exactly the same time, which is the sort of thing that catches in your peripheral vision and distracts from the play.
There's an autograph album and they're admiring the autographs in it. But from where I sat, the pages of the book looked blank.
At one point they start complaining about how tennis players today grunt with every shot. Fine. And the sound effects of the tennis game include grunts starting with that scene. Why weren't the offstage players grunting until halfway through the second set?