Word: absurdities
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With a natural style essential to Simon plays, Achtman and McPhee display their characters' foibles coping with absurd situations--a robbery, for instance, in which the thieves steal everything but Mel's khaki pants--until Mel flips out. As his life unravels Achtman builds to a Vesuvius-like explosion. Eventually regaining control, he learns a new perspective, distinguishing the true necessities of life his cache of East Side luxuries...
...Housewife's Moment of Truth," provides a primer for the housewife who has recently become aware she is oppressed. ("Decide what housework needs to be done. Then cut the list in half... Do not feel guilty.") It also lists various epiphanic moments when women realized their traditional role was absurd (at a consciousness-raising group exercise, the women discover they envision themselves as domesticated cats; a husband praises himself for helping his working wife with housework on his vacation...
...Establishment critics. Philosophy has taken the place of bitterness. As he reckons it, "If a man is in bed with an other man's wife, that's literature. If the subject is the opening up of half of our country, that's not. It's absurd. Those guys seem to write just to excite each other up there on Martha's Vineyard...
...they are "marionettes," then it follows that they are controlled by invisible strings, by forces that the individual himself cannot perceive and that must elude even wise analysis. If this is so, then the whole effort to possess someone else, even in the radical way that Peter used, is absurd, as is the effort to understand it in conventional moral and emotional terms...
...began sculpting about two years ago-and then by accident. "I happened to carve a piece of wood that had fallen off a chair," he recalls. "I didn't really know how to carve, but as a scriptwriter I had been influenced by the French theater of the absurd, especially Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Ionesco's The Bald Soprano. So I decided to try to carve a kind of theater of the absurd in wood." Though many foreigners and Chinese alike have been impressed by the energy and originality of his work...