Thank you for your comments. I love dialogue and am glad you decided to engage in one. I do have some thoughts about your comments, of course. In a few places I actually agree with you and in a few places you took as criticism something that was not meant as such.

I mentioned you were charming because you charmed me, both in the lobby and with your introduction. You are right, I should have noticed that you were sitting in the audience, not running the lights. I apologize to you and to our readers.

As for the comment about you asking the audience to turn of the cell phones, this was not a criticism at all. I was just pointing out that you used that moment that most theatres use to get the electronics handled to also elaborate on why you had written the play. Perhaps I could have made that connection more clear.

Yes, you are right again, the original takes place in France, which I actually knew. It was written by a Russian, it did not take place in Russia. Again, I apologize for that incorrect statement and thank you for pointing it out to me and our readers.

The big thing however, was the point about the symbolism of why HE decides to become a clown, and one who gets slapped. Yes, you left the dialogue with his rival in tact. However, the reason, specifically, in the original, that HE joins the circus and why he decides getting slapped will be his bit, is specifically that life has beaten him and made him a clown. In your adaptation, he joins the circus precisely because he no longer wants to (or, actually never wanted to) teach the propaganda of the Third Reich. It therefore becomes a little bit puzzling that he decides that being slapped will be his thing.

Of course, clowns only use pretend slaps. No, I don’t expect anyone on stage to get hurt. What I said was they were obviously pretend slaps. I have both seen and been in plays with very safe fight choreography that was very convincing, with similar types of slaps in them, but the audience did not know they were “pretend”. It may have been a trick of my seat or a function of a single performance, but during the show I saw, the slaps were obviously several inches from the people’s faces.

Yes, there was a typo in the final mention of the name of the theatre. It has been corrected. Thank you for bringing it to my attention. We are always chagrined when a typo, especially as blatant as that, gets through. I have said in the past that we strive to be accurate, that mistakes will get through and that I dearly hope we will correct any mistake we make once we are made aware of it. I, personally, have been making stupid mistakes a lot, lately. And as I’m the editor of LATR, there isn’t anyone to slap me before something gets posted when I do.

I do not think my review was mean spirited. I’m sorry you did. Again, thank you for bringing your thoughts to the conversation.