Word: absurdistly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Another trap in Stoppard's play is the confining of rich, mock-Elizabethan dialogue to a spare, absurdist setting--as critics have pointed out, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern draws heavily from Samuel Beckett's style. But director Kaplan perhaps tips the scales too heavily toward the absurd tradition. The stark stage, the sparse furniture are all there, and rightly so. But the Shakespearean tradition is just as important: Stoppard includes sizable chunks from Hamlet, and his own words show a penchant for language tricks...
...removal of Bloom Country suggests that the transition from the safe and complacent liberalism of Garry Trudeau to Berke Breathed's absurdist anarchy was a more radical departure that The Crimson was willing to accept for long...
...week at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Part narrative epic, part rock opera, part home movie, United States is a sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued, aphoristic examination of 20th century life in 78 segments, lasting six hours and taking two evenings to perform. Wagnerian in its scope, Carrollian in its absurdist wit, Carsonian in its deadpan, stand-up-comic timing, Anderson's work is the biggest, most ambitious and most successful example to date of the avant-garde hybrid known as performance...
Apparently repentant at charging full price for a half-length evening, Cherson has tacked on after the performance one of Beckett's self-directed made-for-T.V. shorts, untitled Ghost Trio, it makes Krapp's Last Tape look like Oklahoma! by comparison. While hardcore absurdist buffs may find this collection of long, gray pauses and slow, expressionless voices interesting Ghost Trio acts primarily as a soporific and is assuredly not worth staying for. Better to walk out during the brief intermission between the shows, however gingerly, with the oppressive miasma of Krapp still fresh in your mind...
...earliest one-acter, The Room (1957), to his latest drama, Betrayal-begins on a note of nervous apprehension. What proceeds after that is not the unfolding of a plot but the revelation of a state of being, a kind of black comic hell consisting of menace, panic, boredom and absurdist non sequiturs. His characters are caught in seemingly desperate and openly despairing situations that cannot be ameliorated and that may end in psychological or physical violence...