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[[boxed[[image - A woman standing between two men]][[/boxed]] Left (from right): John Hall (Tuck Milligan) wants his wife Susanna (Laila obins) and Rafe (Armand Schultz) to realize on their own that they mus cover up their affair [[boxed]] [[image - Peter Whelan]] Peter Whelan (Left:) "The moment you have people who can only survive by covering up their real feelings, then you have the explosion material of a play."[[/boxed]] Whelan says he things all plays, comedies or tragedies, "are about survival-how to survive in your relationships with people." And the power of sexual attraction, he says can be detrimental to survival. "It's like gravity. I once has a teacher who said gravity is both benign and mailgnant-without it we would fly off the face of the Earth, but if you fall out of a seventh floor window, you will die. Sexual attraction is like that-without it we wouldn't exist, but people kill themselves and others and are racked with conscience and pain because of it." The character of Susanna, he says, is a combination of truth and his imagination. "I think its very pleasing to have just enough facts but not too many, so you can let your imagination run. But with Susanna, you have more facts. We have an epigraph on her tomb, which-unlike Shakespeare's, which tells you nothing-tells you a lot about her. That she was clever, sympathetic to the sick, an inquiring woman. She took an interest in her husband's medicine, something that was frowned on for a woman in her time. Later [[boxed]] CLUE #9-FOR PHOTO #9 ON PAGE 6: Cherry Jones was named Best Actress in a Play in the title role of this play by Ruth and Augustus Goetz. [[/boxed]] 54 [[boxed - yellow background]]WWW.PLAYBILL.COM[[/boxed]][[image-mouse pointer]] [[underlined]][[orange]]PURE[[red]]THEATRE[[purple]]ONLINE[[/underlined]] in life, she inherited Shakespeare's house, the biggest in Stratford, and on one occasion she played host to King Charle's Queen, Henrietta Maria. So she was considered the sort of woman who would entertain a Queen." For Laila Robins, who plays Susanna, her role conveys a feminist message. "Susanna is intelligent, spiritual and also sexual," says Robins, whose New York theatre credits include The Real Thing and Mrs. Klein. "She is part of a society in which she's not really allowed to have an occupation. That she's working in her husband's apothecary is really taboo. She has a great intellectual and physical life force, and she can't do anything with it. She can't become a doctor. And it's a huge need she has." Michael Attenborough, the play's director and principle associate director of the R.S.C., said that for him, "the play is about the truth-what is truth, and if the truth is seen as a kind of moral absolute, to whom are we to be truthful? Somebody one said to me he didn't think it was possible for people to be 100 percent honest with each other, that the most you could hope for was that we would be honest to ourselves. Susanna maintains that honesty in terms of her own inegrity, in terms of her accountability to herself. She is truthful, yet she stands in the middle of Worcester Cathedral, in front of God, and lies." Attenboroaugh says he was intrigued by the play's connection to the Bard himself. "Obviously, all of us who work at the R.S.C. are fascinated by Shakespeare. And our fascination is increased by the fact that biographically we know virtually nothing about the man. So just maybe, through Susanna, you can see a hint that here was a woman, and by extension a father, who were ahead of their time, who were seeing life in shades of gray rather than in black and white, who were not seeing morality or religious tolerance in the same terms as the people around them. It was fascinating in 1613, and it's fascinating now." [[end page]] [[start page]] [[advertisement]] LONGINES L'ELEGEANCE DU TEMPS DEPUIT 1832 [[image - female hand with woman's face, watch with pink face]] Longines DolceVita KENJO JEWELRY, 200 W 57th STREET, NEW YORK, NY 10019 212-333-7220 SWISS MADE - WWW.LONGINES.COM
