Last one on Bucky, I promise (for a while).
Don Aucoin's review (and Marcus Stern's photos) of “R. Buckminster Fuller: The History (and Mystery) of the Universe,’’ in today's Boston Globe are spectacular. Aucoin captures the affect of the set, the script, and the actor:
Whether he is simply sitting in a high-backed chair, standing at a table and manipulating geometric shapes to illustrate a point, or bounding about set designer David Lee Cuthbert’s circular, cobalt-blue platform — which, fittingly enough, suggests a swirling cosmos — [Thomas] Derrah conveys Fuller’s perpetual excitement in the workings of the universe and his own remarkable mind.
And Aucoin honors playwright-director D.W. Jacobs's fine lines:
Derrah’s Bucky blends a childlike sense of discovery with a didact’s need to instruct and an aphorist’s knack for making his points in a pithy phrase, viz.: “You have to decide at the outset whether you are trying to make money or trying to make sense, as they are mutually exclusive’’; “All ideologies range somewhere between the Great Pirates and the Marxists, between the fire and the frying pan’’ or “Muscle is nothing; mind is everything. But muscle is still in control of human affairs.’’
Wish all the photos from the Globe were online for you to see. Actually, it's worth buying today's paper if you only read here just to see Stern's cover photo that manages to capture what the stage really looks like.
I leave you with this, the video posted to the ART site (and YouTube) in which Doug Jacobs describes how he came to Fuller and concludes with Allegra Fuller Snyder, daughter of, calling her father "a great teacher to the world." Check.
