Thirteen Clocks

Only about sixty people filtered into Agassiz for the opening of James Thurber's Thirteen Clocks Wednesday night and that was unfortunate for several people. It was too bad for the ones who did not filter in because Thurber seems always to be very fine.

But it was also hard on the Radcliffe Dance Group and the non-Radcliffe people who took the male parts. For a ballet sort of thing with a narrator who reads prose that usually turns into poetry must be very quiet and smooth and like a dream vista so that the dancers do for the audience what the prose cannot. When there are only sixty people scattered close in front of a small stage, it is hard for the dancers to be either silent or abstract.

The musicians did the most for the dream. They put piano, flute, violin, and harp together with a very good and strange effect. The harp was a very fine touch by Margaret E. Sloan.

The dancers themselves tried very hard and a decent part of the time managed the very much task of uniting motion with the prose which came sometimes from narrator-director Harold Scott and sometimes from a chorus. Inexperience came naturally in several times to divorce the action from the story, but it was rare enough not to matter.

Martha Davidson seemed to have read about the only-Golux-in-the-world with considerable understanding. And she somehow communicated this understanding to her body so that the Golux was consistently right and helped the whole thing go along. Her protectorate, Prince Zorn by Glenn Goldberg, was gracefully awkward and cloud-eyed as he followed the only Golux over the Duke's dead body to the hand of the Princess Saralinda. Goldberg and Miss Davidson were most always very good at being what they should.

The Duke did not come quit so well. Richard Chaffee confused too often the sophisticated evil of the Duke with the organic writhings of a monster. Ruth Emerson, as his niece, the Princess Saralinda, contrasted warmth and serenity with the Duke's icy fingers nicely when she first came on. But she did not bend as Thurber expanded her into the floating symbol of molested maidens.

Probably because they were not called upon to represent pure virtue or pure evil, the rest of the dancers were good. Karen Wilk wore the mask of hark and skulked about with the mystery necessary for her ultimate metamorphosis. Also part of the palace menage, the guards did what was required, particularly Eleanor Sutherland, who did more. As good were the tavern people.

Scott and the speakers did their jobs and Mrs. Spencer Martin directed the dance with the above results. Costumes were well done by Leslie Van Zandt, but the lighting did not help at all. That was unfortunate because it could have done very much.

This is the way it was. All of them could have done much, many of them did. For the Thirteen Clocks is very good and they did it rather well.