Word: absurdist
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Sergeant Phil Esterhaus (Michael Conrad) is a ham-hock-faced man in his 50s with a gentle disposition, a teenage girlfriend and an absurdist's command of the bureaucratic vocabulary-"Be reminded: female officers will, according to policy, perform all in-depth searches of female suspects." Howard Hunter (James Sikking) is a SWAT man with a Patton complex; he shoots his way into liquor stores and out of toilet stalls, and warns his boss that "you wouldn't want to be accused of having a bunch of daisies where your cinch belt ought to be." Detective Mick Belker...
...servant Cocky--the embodiment of England's righteous lower class--imagine their own metaphysical stage and act out society's cruelties in The Game. As Sir arbitrarily changes the rules, forcing Cocky to grovel for a loaf of bread, Greasepaint seems like a Romper Room production of some absurdist play. For the entire first act, The Game follows its repetitive course with Sir betraying poor, dim-witted Cocky's confidence again and again...
...universe portrayed in Terry Won't Talk follows the absurdist archetype--it's only "new and fascinating," as Wheeler says in Terry Rex, "in the sense that a man who's been shipwrecked on a desert island for two hundred years might find a telephone new and fascinating." It includes the disutility of language: language is only dinner-table "chatter," and all attempts to get Terry to verbalize his meaning fail (Linn-Baker goes through the play without a word). There is the failure even of rational thought, as epitomized in the trivializing portrait of Chester. We get the dehumanizing...
...meant to be taken altogether seriously; Leib's artistry in creating a fine one-act play, and the softpedalled wryness of the pretentious program notes (including quotes from Kafka, Steiner, and Beckett, as well as Wittgenstein) only enhance the subtlety of what amounts to an elaborate parody of an absurdist drama. This is not to say that Leib does not believe in an absurdist view of the universe--he clearly does. He just doesn't believe in writing a play about it. His focus is not on the ideas themselves, which are, as Terry should be the first...
Written soon after the masterful Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Enter a Free Man shows us a different Tom Stoppard, a playwright who has curbed (somewhat unwillingly) his absurdist humor and created a sensitive portrait of a man waging a rather pathetic battle with society. The result, an uneasy balance of typical Stoppardesque repartee ("Look at the Japanese! The Japanese inventors are small...") and more down-to-earth pathos, neverthless works as a unit. Enter a Free man may not rank with Stoppard's prize-winning comedies, but it remains a warm and amusing play...