Word: absurdities
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Though the play recaptures Anderson's old simple virtues, it reveals some of his ingrained faults. He has resisted for the nonce his usual high-flown poetizing, or at any rate put it to half-comic use by letting an absurd Southern private spout Byron, Keats, Arnold, T. S. Eliot. But Anderson is sometimes wordy even in prose. Now and then he overworks his pathos. He throws in a jarring dream sequence. "His taste sometimes falters. Fortunately his theme, like a horse more astute than its rider, saves him from ever getting too far off the road...
This strange story and its performance (it is billed as "the American Mrs. Miniver") fit each other like gloves without hands in them. Fay Bainter succeeds against hopeless odds in making her absurd part plausible. So does Miles Mander, as the neurasthenic doctor. There are moments of high farce when the air-warden butler gets mixed up with Spring Byington (in her bedroom) during a blackout, and when the Widow Bainter wanders in on a kind of middle-aged seraglio scene with first-aiders all wound up in one another's bandages. Otherwise, high seriousness is the note...
...Lincoln's death inspired Little Tad ("God bless the little orphan boy, a father's darling pride"), post-war scorn for the South jelled into the unwarranted Jeff in Petticoats. The absurd feminine posture of the late '60s, called the Grecian Bend, was ribbed in a song. So was the style of tasseled shoes...
...horror of "Dracula" grips its audience so firmly that a few minor slips or weaknesses don't matter much. It is good theatre any time and has just the proper flavor for summer fare. Some of the lines may sound trite and some simply absurd, but the laughter disappears after a few attempts at blood-sucking. If you can forget sensitive, psychological drama for a while, you'll be sitting on the edge of your seat most of the evening. And you may not feel like taking the shortest route home through the darkened Yard after two and a half...
...afraid of his own absurd sentimentality, and the things it had led him to say in the letter. There were all those sentences about the Concord picnic, and the firelight party in the field house the night of the dance. Every trite and sentimental thing that anyone had ever written, Vag had put into his letter because he couldn't express himself any better. He wondered what had happened to his old flair for originalities...