Word: absurdist
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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DUCK VARIATIONS and SEXUAL PERVERSITY IN CHICAGO. This double bill of one-acters by a fresh young playwright, David Mamet, 28, bubbles with absurdist humor and shows how people use word masks to shield their true feelings...
...teacher is an old pro, Eddie Waters (Milo O'Shea), whose last laugh seems to have sunk long ago in the still pond of his face. As his students sprint through their routines - ethnic, absurdist one-liners, god-awful - Eddie offers his philosophy of comedy: "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...
...scene is a poor, bedraggled Dublin district during the doomed 1916 Easter Week Rebellion. O'Casey had no illusions about that sadly absurdist affray. Commandant Jack Clitheroe (Clive Geraghty) of the Irish Citizen Army is a crackbrained patriot who is willing to die for his country but not to live for it. The Dublin tenement dwellers are represented as drunken, excitable souls, passionately unified by a nationalistic cause...
...does could have been done better. On the other hand, it is a very difficult movie to judge because it takes up a previously forbidden subject-the blacklisting of showfolk suspected of Communist leanings during the early '50s-and has the nerve, and grace, to take an absurdist view of that deplorable era. For that, and for Woody Allen's fine performance (against his usual comic grain) in the title role, it deserves respectful attention...
...idled away his life as a compulsive gambler and is now a gigolo in a nightclub. The woman he lives with is the club hustler (Suzanne Lederer). The conversational pas de trois that these three engage in is replete with bitterness and non-sequitur absurdist humor. The performers are also forced to carry an elephantine load of symbolism...