Word: absurdistly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Neil Simon is probably tired of hearing that his work subsists on absurdist non sequiturs, deli-flavored New York humor and crisp punch-liners. So what else is new? Not Little Me, alas...
...setting is a terrace of a posh hotel overlooking the harbor at Nice, and the first lines addressed to him are from Noel Coward's Private Lives. The plots thicken and boil. Beckett's Endgame and Happy Days are intermingled as well. With zany aplomb, Durang combines absurdist juxtapositions of lines and characters in Spelvin's massive identity crisis...
TIME MARCHES ON--and, in Harold Pinter's world, sometimes retreats. Pinter, after the fashion of most absurdist playwrights, delights in distorting and playing with time. And John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman is a novel of time--a modern narrator looking through a modern window at a Victorian story...
...town butcher (Joseph Leon) sweeps dirt off his porch into his house. Told to lower her voice, the wife (Mary Louise Wilson) of an eye doctor (Harold Gould) scrunches toward the floor. Occasionally, Simon abandons these hoary vaudeville turns for a flash of absurdist humor. The doctor's daughter (Pamela Reed), adorable as she is dumb, is asked what her favorite color is and replies, "Yellow. . . because it doesn't stick to your fingers so much." Her mother mutters: "I think she's wrong. I think it's blue...
Malle animates his vision of a contemporary Gomorrah with an intelligent deployment of detail and hovering shots of inanimate scenes. Some of his ironic directorial comments are almost absurdist: After mob punks kill Joe for stealing their coke, his estranged wife Sally (Susan Sarandon) is left to dispose of the body. When she arrives at the hospital to take a look, there's a gala ceremony to christen its new "Frank Sinatra wing," and right down the hall from Joe's corpse peacock-plumed dancers are kicking their feet while a blow-dried singer (Robert Goulet) croons. "I'm glad...