Word: absurdist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Apartheid is the ineradicable stench in the air of their mean home, but their squabble for power within those walls is neither didactic nor particularly political. The wry, absurdist humor recalls Beckett, and the inchoate sense of menace parallels Pinter. The candor of the final confessional between the brothers is Fugard's own. At Yale, as in the original, Fugard has directed and plays the half-derelict, fair-skinned brother. At the outset he seems fragile, ineffectual, on the border of madness. As the narrative focuses on the implications of his relative whiteness, he gathers strength and wisdom. Zakes Mokae...
...sheer passage of time has helped to heal some wounds. But it has left a certain fatalism. In Viet Nam, the G.I.'s absurdist, shrugging slogan was "It don't mean nuthin'." Today Jim Garnett, a Seattle carpenter who served as an Army supply clerk, says, "It was just something we all went through. Like when you were a kid and your old man comes home drunk at night. He wakes everybody up, everybody knows what's going on, and it makes everyone real uncomfortable. But in the morning, no one talked about...
Customarily, the festival plays seem to be chosen to link up at least loosely in theme. This year there were fewer continuities. Of six full-length shows and six one-acts, three were Southern gothics, two more were raucous absurdist fantasies, three others dealt with diseases and hospitals, two depicted the betrayal of noble people by political movements they had served loyally, one was a heartfelt if muddled historical melodrama, and the last was a conventional two-character problem drama about a marriage. Although the scripts varied in diction and temperament, fully half were in essence realistic...
Rothchild spins a tale of the wild, wild South in which motives, loyalties and identities are lost in a tangle of crime and counterinsurgency. The absurdist flavor of his account is best sampled through a procession of shady characters, including "the terrorist pediatrician," a Cuban exile accused of blowing up one of Castro's airliners and firing a bazooka at ships from the causeway linking Miami to Miami Beach...
...measure of great literature is its capacity to serve as a mirror, allowing each interpreter to see his own concerns reflected. By that standard, Rumanian Director Lucian Pintilie's vision of Tartuffe-a portrait of an absurdist, spy-flecked totalitarian state-is not only legitimate but a tribute to the hardihood of Moliere's 17th century satire of conformity and misplaced religious fervor. Pintilie's production at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis will not please purists: it is manic rather than mannered, it looks abstract and austere rather than luxuriously "in period," and it ingeniously takes liberties...