The oathsome brutality, lusty wine-quaffing, noisy swordplay, sly bedroom tactics, swoony madrigals, neurotic vengeance and gory fratricide of Medicean times, as set forth lavishly in The Jest by Playwright Sem Benelli, were last week introduced in Cleveland. It was the play's first U. S. performance outside of Manhattan, inevitably provoking whispered comparisons by those in the audience who had seen the John-and-Lionel-Barrymore production of 1919. But never were comparisons more idle. The occasion was the opening of the new home of the Cleveland Play House, an outstanding "little" theatre now made...
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