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when she shouldn't have.
As
he listened to them, the shepherd twisted
his head
this
way and that like a startled bird; during the whole of
the first act he kept flattening himself against walls, dashing off
somewhere, his pants flapping, and on
his
return gazing wildly about.
"This stuff stinks," said Nick Schwarz in the intermission. "Only
place it might go down is some dump like Kremenchug."
The intermission was designed to give the maiden time to grow
ripe for betrayal. In the second act we just couldn't recognize her:
she behaved insufferably, her thoughts were clearly elsewhere, and
she lost no time in handing the shepherd back his ring. Thereupon
he led her over to a poverty-stricken but brightly painted image of
the Holy Virgin, and said in his Sicilian patois:
"Signora" (in a low voice, turning away), "the Holy Virgin
desires you to give me a hearing. To Giovanni, the fellow from the
city, the Holy Virgin will grant as many women as he can cope with;
but I need none save you. The Virgin
Mary,
our stainless intercessor,
will tell you exactly the same thing if you ask Her."
The maiden stood with her back to the painted wooden image;
as she listened she kept impatiently tapping her foot.
In the third act Giovanni, the city slicker, met his fate. He was
having a shave at the village barber's, his powerful male legs thrust
out all over the front of the stage; beneath the Sicilian sun the pleats
in
his
waistcoat gleamed. The scene represented a village fair. In a
far comer stood the shepherd; silent he stood there amidst the care–
free crowd. First he hung his head; then he raised it, and beneath
the weight of
his
attentive and burning gaze Giovanni started stirring
and fidgeting in his barber chair, till pushing the barber aside he
leaped to his feet. In a voice shaking with passion he demanded that
the policeman should remove from the village square all persons of
a gloomy and suspicious aspect. The shepherd-the part was played
by
Di
Grasso himself-stood there lost in thought; then he gave a
smile, soared into the air, sailed across the stage, plunged down on
Giovanni's shoulders and having bitten through the latter's throat
began, growling and squinting, to suck blood from the wound. Gio–
vanni collapsed, and the curtain, falling noiselessly and full of menace,
hid from us killed and killer. Waiting for no more, we dashed to the
box-office in Theater Lane, which was to open next day, Nick
Schwarz beating the rest by a short neck. Came the dawn, and with
