Word: absurdly
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...satire is obviously heavy handed, perhaps too much so in spots; the naming of characters is unnecessarily absurd. However, the broad farce opens Kubrick's social criticism to a wider audience than artistic subtlety could have...
...fact that nobody can be quite certain what Endgame means is, in the logic of the theater of the absurd, hardly a handicap. As interpreted by the Theater Company of Boston, the play is intended less to present an allegory or a message than simply to shock. Shock for its own sake, of course, would be merely discomforting. Shock as Endgame produces it wrenches the spectator into the absurdity of the drama and forces him somehow to identify with all the characters at once--they are all abstractions of the ages of man--and to share with them their monstrous...
...play, as you might expect, is in every way archtypically "absurd." Four characters with the unlikely names of Hamm, Clov, Nagg, and Nell (the last two spend the entire evening in barrels) perform against a backdrop of webbed string, barrels, one chair and a ladder. The play itself describes the collapse of blind Hamm's strange world. The cause of the disaster, we gradually understand, is Hamm's conceit. He is, as his name suggests, the abstraction of Actor whose solipsism has reduced his world to a shelter-like setting of old age (his barreled parents, Nagg and Nell...
...great deal of energy on this production. Dustin Hoffman as Clov, Frank Cassidy as Hamm, and Jerry Gershman and Naomi Thornton as Nagg and Nell all act with discipline and tact in a play that tempts them to noise and ranting. The set, by Alexander Pertzoff, is properly absurd. And David Wheeler's direction perfectly exploits the strength of this kind of theater. Experiencing Endgame is in a way like walking into the monastery chapel a few blocks down from Eliot House: we are thrown into another world and made to forget for a moment old sets of mind...
Such notions mean burdening sex with too much deadly importance, suggesting an absurd vision of all those college kids making out, the clerks trying to learn the art of seduction from Dr. Albert Ellis, the young married couples in their hopeful conjugal beds-all only serving the great cause of some sociosexual revolution...