Word: absurdist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
...seats open, he placed a respectable eighth, collecting 23,124 votes. Even some gays find it offensive when he wears a cross as part of his costume or mocks the sacred. But Fertig insists that he is genuinely, if not conventionally, pious. "The sisters share my own sense of absurdist theater," he says. "I believe that you can reach God through your own means...
...stage with sweeping and dynamic gestures, booming tones, and a demonic glint, effectively conveying the sickly obsession of the protagonist. Like her father, Susan Kelly's Beatrice is wronged but not quite innocent, just as she should be. But most importantly, this production captures effectively the play's malevolent absurdist humor. Artaud's characters are felonious, but preposterous, and the McCreery O'Donnell direction deserves credit for avoiding oppressive modern-drama self-seriousness...