Word: acter
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...pageantry was, in a sense, just business as usual. But last week's peerless one-acter also marked a new spirit in the productions of the Windsors, the royal repertory company that takes the country as its national theater and itself as its subject. Horseplay was on show as much as horsemanship, and high spirits sometimes got the better of high style. Here was the first great spectacle graced with the trendified traditionalism of the second generation, the young royals. Even the Queen forsook her trademark bucket-size handbag for a small clutch that could have been borrowed from Daughter...
Sentiment scotches the wit in "About Last Night," an expansion and dilution of David Mamet's 1974 one-acter Sexual Perversity in Chicago. Written as a series of blackout scenes involving two working-class pals and the two young women they fancy, the play was rancid, funny and dead-on-target. So why would Screenwriters Tim Kazurinsky and Denise DeClue want to turn it into a Pillow Talk for the nouveau quiche set? Now the story is about a nice girl (the exemplary Demi Moore) and a pretty guy (Rob Lowe) who triumph over their busybody buddies (Elizabeth Perkins...
...least two things now vitiate the play's impact. In 1955, during the heyday of Freudian illumination, when the play first appeared as a one-acter, shortly to be revised and expanded to a two-acter, Eddie's love for his niece possessed shock effect. Incest isn't what it used to be. Furthermore, one doubts whether the current flood of illegal ah'ens cowers before an immigration official as if he had sounded a storm trooper's knock in the night...
Throughout this long evening (each one-acter lasts more than an hour, and an extended break pushes the final curtain past 11:30) the twin productions maintain a sharp direction and pace that keeps them from flagging. Time speeds up and slows down often in the space between 8 p.m. and midnight; cynicism becomes hope and then a starry-eyed idealism inviting scorn, reality advances and recedes through a spyglass of jingoist jargon and lovers' quarrels. On the surface, the two shows--a self-styled "political allegory with music" and an original drama about a suicidal writer--could hardly have...
Every Pinter play-from his 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...