Beverly Friend

One good reason for having children is that it gives parents and grandparents an excuse for attending great performances. However, Seussical is such an outstanding production — in staging, costumes, music, and acting — that it would be a shame to limit it to small fry. Adults should not miss it. You don’t have to be accompanied by offspring, and in fact, you don’t even have to have any prior knowledge of the works of Theodor Geisel (better known as Dr. Seuss), to thoroughly enjoy the experience.

What a unique and charming expedience to enjoy this one-man — no really one-puppet — show, purportedly covering the last 12 hours in the life of Moses (in real time). The task is no more outrageous than the clever cavorting of the crotchety puppet narrator who — although he has been told he looks Jewish — assures us that he is not made of kosher cardboard. One puppet plus one bare table creates an entire dramatic world.

Certainly, Duras lived a colorful life, born in 1914 in Gia-Dinh, French Indochina (now Vietnam), where her widowed mother struggled to bring up Marguerite and her two brothers. She chronicled these early years in several books which detail the plot of the play, candidly exposing her dysfunctional family. Her mother preferred her oldest to the younger children (resulting in a vicious elder brother who tyrannized the whole family). She engaged in an incestuous relationship her younger brother, and later had a memorable love affair with the spoiled young son of a wealthy Chinese merchant.