Word: absurdes
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...elite. Rarely does an Ivy League college admit a freshman with SAT scores lower than 600. In a recent freshman class at Harvard, 77% came from the top tenth of their high school graduating class and an additional 11% came from the second tenth. It is, of course, statistically absurd to think that these students will make grades that fall into a "normal" distribution. Grading "on the curve" may have made sense at Harvard in the 1920's, when practically anybody with the right parents and enough money was admitted; it makes no sense at all at Harvard...
...Perry Clews" is that, from his initial idea of turning a romantic comedy into an existential tragedy, Cromwell goes on to throw in a little of every modern dramatic technique available. We get flashbacks, fantasies, and changing perspectives. He gives us satire, Freudian complexes, and some theater of the absurd for good measure. Shakespeare's plot is hard enough to follow; Cromwell's is almost impenetrable...
...acting. By contrast, Linda Anne Kirwan is a gifted comedienne, handling the part of Pheobe with real comic flair and singing well, if less vigorously than her rival. Roberto Gaston makes an extraordinarily winning Fairfax, with his broad toothy grin, strong tenor and charming Gilbertian sense of the absurd...
What results is a nicely staged mass confusion, in which allegiances and beliefs switch with a rapidity befitting Ionesco and the theater of the Absurd. This play is full of characters constantly theorizing and grappling with themselves on stage. It is here that a political theme begins to emerge that of interregnum Poland intellectualizing, searching itself, and finally resisting outside aggression...
...teacher is an old pro, Eddie Waters (Jimmy Jewel), whose last laugh seems to have long been buried in the creases of his face. As his pupils sprint apprehensively through their routines -ethnic, absurd one liners, godawful -Eddie offers his philosophy of comedy: "A real comedian dares to see what his listeners shy away from, fear to express. A joke releases the tension, but a true joke has to do more than release tension, it has to liberate the will and the desire, it has to change the situation...