Word: absurdist
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...embarrassment. He didn't just swallow half a bottle of cologne to impress his date. The loser is philosophy--Allen caught the big Why with its pants down. It's this switch-around, from laughing at the man to laughing at the phenomenon that elevates Allen's humor to absurdist satire...
...CAST DOES a more than competent job of keeping Rabe's sometime disjointed work llowing smoothly through moments of both absurdist comedy and high dramatic tension. Some of the credit belongs to director Warren Browner, who had chosen to de-emphasize the play's surrealism and treat it more as a parody of those cheerfully resilient American types, forced for once to confront and destroy the product of their own invested values...
...FANTOME DE LA LIBERTE, by Luis Bufiuel is an antic series of absurdist parlor tricks. All the surreal illusions are linked rather casually by the theme of freedom, by the lunatic effects caused by man's repressive passion for order...
...everything after this is an anti-climax, either. Barnes' touch remains reliably strong throughout the whole play, which runs for three long and rewarding hours, mixing burlesque, absurdist tradition, and blank verse of an elevation hardly to be found since Eliot: "Twill make a desert of this world/Whilst ther's still one man left t' give commands/And another who'll obey them," Carlos says bitterly of all authority. Barnes--if not quite up to the level of his originals--is adept at suggesting Shakespeare, Wilde and the Marx brothers, and is best at bringing them all together to make something...
Public Broadcasting starting its day with an old absurdist film from Roman Polanski's student days? No, just the game-show people beginning theirs with Truth or Consequences, the first of no fewer than 25 half-hours of vapid-fire questions and gaudy prizes. On through the day come a succession of dazzle-dentured, sharp-suited emcees, attempting to smother their contempt for their work and their contestants under a line of chatter as false as a roofing salesman's guarantees...