Cynthia Bassham Actor & Instructor
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The Psychic Life of Savages

Woolly Mammoth Theater - Washington D.C.
Washington Post 5/25/1995

The Psychic Life of Savages

"Perky American girl Sylvia Fluellen (the amazing Cynthia Bassham), the dour, intellectual Yankee brahmin Robert Stoner (Will Marchetti), the self-styled rebel housewife Anne Bittenhand (Naomi Jacobson) and Magus are Freed’s versions of the famously mentally disturbed American poets Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton and the Welsh Ted Hughes Plath’s husband and the only survivor in the group...

...Sylvia has a more worthy opponent in her husband. Ted is a ludicrously manly man, a Celtic blowhard who celebrates the primitive with rough-tough poetry and creates rituals at the slightest provocation. He’s a nasty, arrogant fool, but he meets his match in Sylvia, played by Bassham in a pink sweater as the Coed From Hell. Ambitious, spoiled, self-aggrandizing and mad as a convention of hatters, Bassham’s Sylvia has a toothpaste-ad smile that after a while only reminds you of how predatory her teeth look. The most extreme misogynistic fantasies male writers have ever penned about American women are more than fulfilled—scarily, witchily—in this role mercilessly written by one woman and ferociously acted by another."

Copyright © 2004-2007; Cynthia Bassham
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