INDIGNATION

Dick Hill animates Philip Roth's tragic comedy. (Or is it comic tragedy?) Hill's exuberance and vitality elevate Roth's characters from the written page and through some sort of verbal legerdemain render them as tangible and present as anyone else you encounter. That is especially true of Roth's continuously indignant protagonist, Marcus Meisner, who in 1951 flees Newark and the suddenly suffocating overprotectiveness of his kosher butcher father, for the pastoral and decidedly goyish Winesburg College in rural Ohio. Though Meisner wants nothing more than to follow the rules and excel (and avoid the Korean War), he continually finds himself transgressing this social more or that requisite. Hill's depiction of Marcus's indignation is uproarious but no less than his portrayal of the moral rectitude and sanctimoniousness of Winesburg's elders. M.O. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine [Published: NOVEMBER 2008]